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Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

“I fell in love with the mechanical engineer that spoke,” Gwynne explained during a TED Talk. “She was doing really critical work, and I loved her suit!”103 Gwynne decided right then and there that she too would be a mechanical engineer. And she did it: Her first job out of college was working as a mechanical engineer for Chrysler Motors. Today Gwynne is the president of SpaceX. If you watch SpaceX’s launches, you can often spy Gwynne jumping out of her chair when there is a successful launch! TAKE AWAY THE ARMOR: What is it like to work for Elon for more than sixteen years? Gwynne spelled it out in her TED Talk. “He’s funny, and fundamentally, without him saying anything, he drives you to do your best work.

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When you don’t have a rocket to sell, what’s really important is selling your team, selling the business savvy of your CEO—that’s not really hard to sell these days—and basically, making sure that any technical issue that they have or any concern you can address right away,” Gwynne explained during a TED Talk interview with Chris Anderson.80 Elon’s efforts were no longer about drumming up support for NASA. This was now about getting to Mars his own way and bringing the public with him, first in spirit and ultimately in the flesh. And that required successful technology and successful sales. LOSS In 2002, as the PayPal sale was announced and Elon worked to solve the problems of making a rocket from scratch, Elon’s home life took a devastating turn.

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One year, Elon gave her a nineteenth-century copy of Pride and Prejudice. The Musks went on to have five more boys: twins Griffin and Xavier in 2004 and triplets Damian, Saxon, and Kai in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008. While sharing custody of their five boys, Justine continues writing, giving TED talks, and blogging about her work, life, and realizations along the way. CHAPTER 5 TWO COMPANIES and a FUNERAL On a sunny California summer day in 2002, the haunting sound of a bagpipe rose from the front of a funeral procession. A white hearse and a long line of cars crawled along behind the kilt-clad player in a slow somber journey.

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

He has been editor in chief of the world’s largest science magazine, Discover; the editor of the Washington Post’s magazine; founding editor and editor in chief of This Old House magazine for Time Inc.; senior editor for science at LIFE magazine; and group editor in chief of Weider History Group’s ten history magazines. His first TED Talk, 10 Ways the World Could End, has been watched more than one million times. He is now the editor of Breakthrough Technology Alert, for which he finds the investment opportunities that create true value and move the human race forward. Read the book and watch the talk. Stephen Petranek’s TED Talk, available online: www.TED.com Meet the authors, watch videos and more: SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/Stephen-Petranek IMAGE CREDITS IN ORDER NASA/Lewis Research Center Courtesy of Bonestell LLC Courtesy of Bonestell LLC NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona NASA/JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona NASA/JPL/University of Arizona NASA/JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona © ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G.

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Stephen Petranek’s TED Talk, available online: www.TED.com Meet the authors, watch videos and more: SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/Stephen-Petranek IMAGE CREDITS IN ORDER NASA/Lewis Research Center Courtesy of Bonestell LLC Courtesy of Bonestell LLC NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX Courtesy of SpaceX NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona NASA/JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona NASA/JPL/University of Arizona NASA/JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona © ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGNantes/CNRS/IAS/MSSS NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA/JPL-Caltech/ University of Arizona NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU NASA/JPL/University of Arizona WATCH STEPHEN PETRANEK’S TED TALK Stephen Petranek’s TED Talk, available for free at TED.com, is the companion to How We’ll Live on Mars. Courtesy of TED RELATED TALKS Brian Cox Why We Need the Explorers In tough economic times, our exploratory science programs—from space probes to the LHC—are first to suffer budget cuts. Brian Cox explains how curiosity-driven science pays for itself, powering innovation and a profound appreciation of our existence.

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CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS EPIGRAPH INTRODUCTION The Dream CHAPTER 1 Das Marsprojekt CHAPTER 2 The Great Private Space Race CHAPTER 3 Rockets Are Tricky CHAPTER 4 Big Questions CHAPTER 5 The Economics of Mars CHAPTER 6 Living on Mars CHAPTER 7 Making Mars in Earth’s Image CHAPTER 8 The Next Gold Rush CHAPTER 9 The Final Frontier IMAGINING LIFE ON MARS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR IMAGE CREDITS WATCH STEPHEN PETRANEK’S TED TALK RELATED TALKS ABOUT TED BOOKS COMING SOON ABOUT TED I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs  . . . pushing out into the solar system not just to visit, but to stay. Last month, we launched a new spacecraft as part of a reenergized space program that will send American astronauts to Mars.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, behavioural economics, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, IKEA effect, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, science of happiness, Snapchat, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

His books include Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, and Irrationally Yours. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, Sumi, and their two adorable children, Amit and Neta. Read the book and watch the talks. Dan Ariely’s TED Talks, available online: www.TED.com Meet the authors, watch videos and more: SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/Dan-Ariely WATCH DAN ARIELY’S TED TALKS Dan Ariely’s TED Talks, available for free at TED.com, are the companion to Payoff. PHOTO: BRET HARTMAN/TED RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM Barry Schwartz The way we think about work is broken What makes work satisfying?

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CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS INTRODUCTION From Tragedy to Meaning and Motivation On the complexity of motivation, and a personal story CHAPTER 1 How to Destroy Motivation, or: Work as a Prison Movie Why it’s astonishingly easy to demotivate someone CHAPTER 2 The Joy of (Even Thinking That We Are) Making Something On our deep attachment to our own ideas and creations CHAPTER 3 Money Is from Mars, Pizza Is from Venus, and Compliments Are from Jupiter Why money matters far less than we think CHAPTER 4 On Death, Relationships, and Meaning The crazy urge for symbolic immortality, and how love conquers all EPILOGUE The Answer to the Ultimate Question The mystery of motivation, in summary ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR WATCH DAN ARIELY’S TED TALKS RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM ALSO FROM TED BOOKS ABOUT TED BOOKS ABOUT TED NOTES To the wonderful people in my life who have moved me forward, backward, and sideways. I only wish I told you more clearly and frequently how much you mean to me. INTRODUCTION From Tragedy to Meaning and Motivation On the complexity of motivation, and a personal story We are the CEOs of our own lives.

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They’re short enough to read in a single sitting, but long enough to delve deep into a topic. The wide-ranging series covers everything from architecture to business, space travel to love, and is perfect for anyone with a curious mind and an expansive love of learning. Each TED Book is paired with a related TED Talk, available online at TED.com. The books pick up where the talks leave off An 18-minute speech can plant a seed or spark the imagination, but many talks create a need to go deeper, to learn more, to tell a longer story. TED Books fill this need. ABOUT TED TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (eighteen minutes or less) but also through books, animation, radio programs, and events.

The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes From an Uncertain Science by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Atul Gawande, cognitive dissonance, Johannes Kepler, medical residency, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, stem cell, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes

Mukherjee’s scientific work concerns cancer and stem cells, and his laboratory is known for the discovery of novel aspects of stem cell biology, including the isolation of stem cells that form bone and cartilage. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters. Read the book and watch the talk. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s TED Talk, available online: www.TED.com Meet the authors, watch videos and more at: SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/Siddhartha-Mukherjee WATCH SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE’S TED TALK Siddhartha Mukherjee’s TED Talk, available for free at TED.com, is the companion to The Laws of Medicine. PHOTO: Bret Hartman/TED RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM Stefan Larsson What doctors can learn from each other Different hospitals produce different results on different procedures.

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They’re short enough to read in a single sitting, but long enough to delve deep into a topic. The wide-ranging series covers everything from architecture to business, space travel to love, and is perfect for anyone with a curious mind and an expansive love of learning. Each TED Book is paired with a related TED Talk, available online at TED.com. The books pick up where the talks leave off. An 18-minute speech can plant a seed or spark the imagination, but many talks create a need to go deeper, to learn more, to tell a longer story. TED Books fill this need. ABOUT TED TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).

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We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives, and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, we’re building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers—and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long. In fact, everything we do—from our TED Talks videos to the projects sparked by the TED Prize, from the global TEDx community to the TED-Ed lesson series—is driven by this goal: How can we best spread great ideas? TED is owned by a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation. We hope you enjoyed reading this TED Books eBook. * * * Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from TED Books and Simon & Schuster.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? by Raj Raghunathan

behavioural economics, Blue Ocean Strategy, Broken windows theory, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, deliberate practice, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Phillip Zimbardo, placebo effect, science of happiness, Skype, sugar pill, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Optimism is important for resilience (the ability to bounce back after setbacks). To assess your resilience, see the resilience scale in B. W. Smith et al., “The Brief Resilience Scale: Assessing the Ability to Bounce Back,” International Journal of Behavioral Medicine 15(3) (2008): 194–200. popular TED talk: David Steindl-Rast’s TED talk can be accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBsl3j0YRQ (or by Googling “Steindl-Rast TED talk”). “3 good things with a twist”: The exercise is adapted from the “Three good things” exercise devised by the “father of positive psychology,” Prof. Martin Seligman. For a description of the “three good things” exercise, which, by the way, had a powerful effect (as many as 94 percent of those who practiced it for a mere fifteen days showed a significant improvement in happiness levels), see M.

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Begley, The Mind and the Brain (New York: Regan Books/Harper Collins, 2002). mind-wandering versus not: M. A. Killingsworth and D. T. Gilbert, “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” Science 330(6006) (2010): 932. For an audiovisual summary of the paper, see Killingworth’s TED talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy5A8dVYU3k (the TED talk can be accessed by Googling “Killingsworth TED talk”). behavior affects attitude: This theoretical basis for this phenomenon is something called self-perception theory. The idea is that we infer our characteristics (attitudes, opinions, etc.) based on how we see ourselves behaving; see D. J. Bem, “Self-perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74(3) (1967): 183.

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the “abundance” route: Although the terms “scarcity” and “abundance” don’t have a history of use in academic research (for an exception, see Biberman and Whitty 1997), they have been used frequently in more informal contexts. For example, in his TED talk, Nipun Mehta, the founder of servicespace.org and Karma Kitchen, uses them in ways that evoke a set of concepts very similar to the ones I discuss here. Mehta’s TED talk can be accessed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpyc84kamhw (or by Googling “Nipun Mehta TED talk”). Biberman and Whitty, too, use the terms in a way that is compatible with my use of them; J. Biberman and M. Whitty, “A Postmodern Spiritual Future for Work,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 10(2) (1997): 130–38.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

"World Economic Forum" Davos, animal electricity, clean water, colonial rule, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, fake news, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jimmy wales, linked data, lone genius, microcredit, purchasing power parity, revenue passenger mile, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Walter Mischel

Ola invented and developed Gapminder’s ignorance tests, its structured ignorance measuring project, and its certification process. He crunched the data and developed the materials for most of Hans’s TED talks and lectures. From 1999, Ola led the development of the famous animated bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, used by millions of students across the world to understand multidimensional time series. In 2007, the tool was acquired by Google, where Ola led the Google Public Data Team between 2007 and 2010. He then returned to Gapminder to develop new free teaching materials. Ola lectures widely and his joint TED talk with Hans has been viewed millions of times. Ola has received several awards for his work at Gapminder, including a Résumé Super-communicator Award and the Guldägget Titanpriset in 2017 and the Niras International Integrated Development Prize in 2016.

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Anna is a lecturer and the guardian of the end user at Gapminder, making sure that everything Gapminder does is easy to understand. Together with Ola, Anna directed Hans’s TED talks and other lectures, developed the Gapminder graphics and slides, and designed the user interface of the animated bubble-chart tool Trendalyzer. When the tool was acquired by Google in 2007, she went to work for Google as a senior usability designer. In 2010, Anna returned to Gapminder to develop new free teaching materials. Dollar Street, launched in 2016, is Anna’s brainchild and the subject of her 2017 TED talk. Anna has won several awards for her work at Gapminder, including a Résumé Super-communicator Award, the Guldägget Titanpriset, and the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award in 2017.

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About the Author Hans Rosling was a medical doctor, professor of international health, and renowned public educator. He was an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and he cofounded Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden and the Gapminder Foundation. His TED talks have been viewed more than thirty-five million times, and he was listed as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people in the world. Hans died in 2017, having devoted the last years of his life to writing this book. Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans’s son and daughter-in-law, are cofounders of the Gapminder Foundation, and Ola its director from 2005 to 2007 and from 2010 to the present day.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

And the danger isn’t only in what they say in this new language, but also in the possibility that they might somewhere down the line stop thinking in their native one. * * * — Five years after giving her TED talk, Cuddy continued to live in the beautiful new world it had built for her. She was now famous, among the top thought leaders of her time. Still, success, and the particular way in which it had come, had caused a dilemma for her. She had been studying prejudice and sexism for nearly twenty years, and even after her breakout continued to work on those topics with academic colleagues. She had often taken on such themes in harsh, perpetrator-blaming ways. But a viral TED talk all but drowned out every other thing she had ever said, and now she was fielding lucrative invitation after invitation to offer her ideas in that same safe way.

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It is an era in which capitalism has no ideological opponent of similar stature and influence, and in which it is hard to escape the market’s vocabulary, values, and assumptions, even when pondering a topic such as social change. Socialism clubs have given way to social enterprise clubs on American campuses. Students have also been influenced by the business world’s commandment, disseminated through advertisements and TED talks and books by so-called thought leaders, to do whatever you do “at scale,” which is where the “millions of people” thing came from. It is an era, moreover, that has relentlessly told young people that they can “do well by doing good.” Thus when Cohen and her friends sought to make a difference, their approaches were less about what they wanted to take down or challenge and more about the ventures they wanted to start up, she said.

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Thought leaders tend, Drezner says, to “know one big thing and believe that their important idea will change the world”; they are not skeptics but “true believers”; they are optimists, telling uplifting stories; they reason inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from authority. They go easy on the powerful. Susan Sontag, William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal were public intellectuals; Thomas L. Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and Parag Khanna are thought leaders. Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change. Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners; thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.” Three factors explain the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of the thought leader, according to Drezner.

Stretch by Roger Frampton

Kickstarter, TED Talk

Alternatively, if you don’t want to spend any money, you can of course use a book instead of a block, a couple of towels instead of a mat and a belt instead of a strap. MY TED TALK ‘WHY SITTING DOWN DESTROYS YOU’: https://bit.ly/3jYvFAB Perhaps you just grabbed this book from the shelf at your local bookstore or came across it online and don’t really know much about my backstory or why I’m all about stretching. My TED talk, aptly named ‘Why Sitting Down Destroys You’, has been viewed, at the time of writing, by over 3 million people. If you’d like to watch the 13-minute talk where I discuss my childhood idol, you can find this on YouTube.

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Kids copy what they see, rather than what we tell them to do. They are much more likely to move intuitively and respect their bodies’ natural movement if they see the adults around them doing the same. This is why, when parents come to me and ask: ‘What can I do to make sure my kid moves the best?’, I say, ‘lead by example’. In fact, my TED talk ended with this statement: ‘We should lead by example and move like them’. And where should we start with that? Right where we began. By integrating the essential stretches into our lives and regaining full access to our bodies. Whatever we practise, we get better at. If we run all the time, we become better at running, if we swim or cycle consistently, our bodies adapt to help us become better at those activities.

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As far as I was concerned, or could remember, I’d never been able to touch my toes, sit in a squat or even to sit comfortably on the floor without my knees hurting, or my back rounding. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just had a pivotal conversation. It marked the beginning of something not only special and life-changing for me personally, but that literally millions of people around the world would eventually hear me speak about in my TED talk. I was a fit but very stiff guy (who aspired to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger) who realized in a gym class that he’d unwittingly sacrificed the primal movements he had started life with. From that day on my life changed. I started to understand what Alex meant by getting it ‘back’. I suddenly began to notice little kids in the park, on the street and in cafés, sitting and playing happily in a squat position.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Sandberg’s manifesto is a New York Times bestseller and has sold over a million and a half copies. Sandberg has been pushing women to be more ambitious for a number of years, through female networking events in Silicon Valley, Women’s Leadership Day at Facebook, and monthly dinners for women at her home. In 2010 she extended her message through a TED Talk that went viral, and followed up with an equally popular 2011 commencement speech at Barnard College. Lean In revisits and expands the themes in these speeches and argues that women need to stop being afraid and start “disrupting the status quo.” “Staying quiet and fitting in … aren’t paying off.”

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Mol, “Greening Global Consumption: Redefining Politics and Authority,” Global Environmental Change 18, 2008, 350–9. 15John Boli and George Thomas, “World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization,” American Sociological Review 62: 2, April 1997, 171–90. 16Josée Johnston, “The Citizen-Consumer Hybrid: Ideological Tensions and the Case of Whole Foods Market,” Theory and Society 37, 2007, 229–70; see also Josée Johnston, Andrew Biro, and Norah MacKendrick. “Lost in the Supermarket: The Corporate-Organic Foodscape and the Struggle for Food Democracy,” Antipode 41: 3, 2009, 509–32. 17Graham Hill, TED Talk, 2013; Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi have written a book challenging the veracity of American overspending. See The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke, New York: Basic Books, 2004. 18Mackey and Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism, p. 14. 19Ibid., p. 31. 20Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008, p. 69; see also Erik Swyngdeouw, “Impossible Sustainability and the Post-Political Condition,” in David Gibbs and Rob Krueger, eds., The Sustainable Development Paradox: Urban Political Economy in the United States and Europe, New York: Guilford Press, 2007. 21Mackey and Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism, pp. 151, 31. 22Ibid., p. 31. 23Bernard E.

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We spend years acquiring social capital (connections, access to networks) and cultural capital (skills and education) so we can find a job we love and hopefully keep a roof over our heads. The “do what you love” message is at the heart of the work-identity fusion. It advises you to follow your passion. If you’re unhappy, it’s because you’re not following your passion. If your job sucks, you’re at the wrong job. Video blogger and social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk’s famous TED Talk is a “shot in the arm” for those pining for a more fulfilling life: There are way too many people in this room right now that are doing stuff they hate. Please stop doing that. There is no reason in 2008 to do shit you hate! None. Promise me you won’t … Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘What do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?’

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

In addition, Amy read an early version of the book and prevented me from committing a few serious errors of omission. I am deeply indebted to Chris Anderson, who has given me numerous opportunities to present my ideas at TED. When I gave my first TED talk in 2005 I would never have dreamed that millions of people, from all over the world, would eventually see it. I gave my most recent TED talk in 2013, and this book grew out of it. I thank June Cohen for giving me the opportunity, and Michelle Quint for providing insightful editorial suggestions. I also want to thank Allison Dworkin for reading the first draft of the book and sharing with me her critical insights along with the encouragement to respond to them.

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He spoke about it at the TED Conference in 2005, and has appeared on dozens of radio shows, and has appeared on dozens of radio shows, including NPR's Morning Edition, and Talk of the Nation, and has been interviewed on Anderson Cooper 360 (CNN), the Lehrer News Hour (PBS), The Colbert Report, and CBS Sunday Morning. In 2009, Schwartz spoke at TED about our loss of wisdom. He subsequently published a book on this topic, Practical Wisdom, with his colleague Kenneth Sharpe. Watch Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk, available for free at TED.com, is the companion to Why We Work. Asa Mathat/TED related talks Shawn Achor The happy secret to better work We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity.

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First TED Books hardcover edition September 2015 TED BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of TED Conferences, LLC SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com. For information on licensing the TED Talk that accompanies this book, or other content partnerships with TED, please contact TEDBooks@TED.com. Interior design by: MGMT Jacket design by: Chip Kidd Jacket art by [[TK]] Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Asteroid Hunters (TED Books) by Carrie Nugent

Dava Sobel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kuiper Belt, TED Talk

On this weekly podcast, she invites astronomers, planetary scientists, and engineers to sit, share a drink, and tell the world about their corner of the cosmos. Read the book and watch the talk. Dr. Carrie Nugent’s TED Talk, available online: www.TED.com Meet the authors, watch videos and more: SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/Carrie-Nugent WATCH CARRIE NUGENT’S TED TALK Carrie’s TED Talk, available for free at TED.com, is the companion to Asteroid Hunters. PHOTO: RYAN LASH / TED RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM Jedidah Isler How I Fell in Love with Quasars, Blazars, and Our Incredible Universe Jedidah Isler first fell in love with the night sky as a little girl.

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CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 A Wild Frontier CHAPTER 2 Things that Hit the Earth CHAPTER 3 Rules of Asteroid Hunting CHAPTER 4 The First Asteroid CHAPTER 5 Terrestrial Asteroid Hunting CHAPTER 6 My Favorite Telescope CHAPTER 7 The Giggle Factor CHAPTER 8 The Planetary Defense Coordination Office EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FURTHER READING ABOUT CARRIE NUGENT WATCH CARRIE NUGENT’S TED TALK RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM MORE FROM TED BOOKS ABOUT TED BOOKS ABOUT TED NOTES To the next generation of scientists, who have so much to discover 1 A Wild Frontier I want you to imagine the solar system. I bet you’re trying to recall an image from a childhood textbook: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

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They’re short enough to read in a single sitting, but long enough to delve deep into a topic. The wide-ranging series covers everything from architecture to business, space travel to love, and is perfect for anyone with a curious mind and an expansive love of learning. Each TED Book is paired with a related TED Talk, available online at TED.com. The books pick up where the talks leave off. An eighteen-minute speech can plant a seed or spark the imagination, but many talks create a need to go deeper, to learn more, to tell a longer story. TED Books fill this need. ABOUT TED TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (eighteen minutes or less) but also through books, animation, radio programs, and events.

Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World by Nataly Kelly, Jost Zetzsche

airport security, Berlin Wall, Celtic Tiger, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, glass ceiling, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the market place

“No matter how cool, useful, or popular a website may be, the products and services offered cannot be used or bought in a safe, effective, and meaningful way on an international scale without translation.” Ideas Worth Spreading Beyond English Eighteen minutes. That’s the maximum time available to deliver a TED talk. But it’s a talk that will likely be watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. If you’ve never seen a TED talk before, be prepared to get addicted. Imagine a collection of some of the world’s most dynamic speakers, sharing their thoughts on their life’s work in less than twenty minutes. Steve Jobs was among them, and it’s exactly that sort of “brainiac charisma” that characterizes most of TED’s speakers.

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The requests were so persistent that TED knew it had to take them seriously. So the organization set about building a system that would allow volunteers to subtitle the talks in other languages. And the system works. More than a thousand talks have been translated, and 20 percent of all TED talk video views come from people watching with subtitles enabled. Volunteers translate TED talks into languages as diverse as Bislama, spoken natively by six thousand people in Vanuatu, and Hupa, a Native American language with less than two thousand speakers. On the other hand, you’ll also find plenty of translated talks that are available in languages with enormous populations, such as Malayalam, the mother tongue of thirty-six million people in India, and Khmer, with fifteen million speakers in Cambodia.

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Perhaps even more important, they are on offer in a whopping ninety-one languages, and rising fast.9 And that’s where translation comes in. Go to the TED website, and you can find talks that have been subtitled by an impressive seventy-five hundred registered volunteer translators.10 How did the project start? “Soon after we made TED talks available for the first time, people around the world began approaching us to see if they could subtitle the talks into other languages so they could be shared,” explains Kristin Windbigler, Open Translation Project manager at TED.11 She points out that these enthusiastic individuals were not requesting TED to provide the subtitles; instead, they were volunteering to do it.

The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation by Hannah Fry

Brownian motion, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Nash equilibrium, Pareto efficiency, power law, recommendation engine, Skype, stable marriage problem, statistical model, TED Talk

She also co-presents the BBC Worldwide YouTube channel and regularly appears on TV and radio in the UK. Hannah lives in London with her husband Phil, who – luckily – came along at exactly 38 per cent. She has several leftover Python codes from her wedding planning, which can be distributed upon request. You can find her on twitter: @fryrsquared. WATCH HANNAH FRY’S TED TALK Hannah Fry’s TED Talk, available for free at TED.com, is the companion to The Mathematics of Love. RELATED TALKS ON TED.COM Helen Fisher Why we love, why we cheat Anthropologist Helen Fisher takes on a tricky topic – love – and explains its evolution, its biochemical foundations and its social importance.

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The right of Hannah Fry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. First TED Books hardcover edition February 2015 TED, the TED logo, and TED Books are trademarks of TED Conferences, LLC. For information on licensing the TED talk that accompanies this book, or other content partnerships with TED, please contact TEDBooks@TED.com. Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 1st Floor 222 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8HB www.simonandschuster.co.uk Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-47114-180-5 ISBN: 978-1-47114-179-9 (ebook) The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given.

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They’re short enough to read in a single sitting, but long enough to delve deep into a topic. The wide-ranging series covers everything from architecture to business, space travel to love, and is perfect for anyone with a curious mind and an expansive love of learning. Each TED Book is paired with a related TED Talk, available online at TED.com. The books pick up where the talks leave off. An 18-minute speech can plant a seed or spark the imagination, but many talks create a need to go deeper, to learn more, to tell a longer story. TED Books fill this need.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 2015, I published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, pointing out how unprepared the world was and laying out what it would take to get ready. I adapted the warning for a TED talk called “The Next Epidemic? We’re Not Ready,” complete with an animation showing 30 million people dying from a flu as infectious as the 1918 one. I wanted to be alarming to make sure the world got ready—I pointed out that there would be trillions of dollars of economic losses and massive disruption. This TED talk has been viewed 43 million times, but 95 percent of those views have come since the COVID pandemic started. The Gates Foundation, in partnership with the governments of Germany, Japan, and Norway, and the Wellcome Trust, created an organization called CEPI—the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—to accelerate work on vaccines against new infectious diseases and help those vaccines reach people in the poorest countries.

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Although CEPI and the Seattle Flu Study were good investments that helped when COVID came, not much else was accomplished. More than 110 countries analyzed their preparedness and the WHO outlined steps to close the gaps, but nobody acted on these assessments and plans. Improvements were called for but never made. Six years after I gave my TED talk and published that NEJM paper, as COVID-19 was spreading around the world, reporters and friends would ask me if I wished I had done more back in 2015. I don’t know how I could have gotten more attention on the need for better tools and practice scaling them up rapidly. Maybe I should have written this book in 2015, but I doubt many people would have read it

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Not only would it create a system for testing lots of volunteers and sequencing lots of viral genomes, but—subject to privacy safeguards—the sequencing data would be linked to information about the people it came from. And the near-real-time, citywide flu map that the project was going to create would be a game changer for detecting and stopping outbreaks. I thought the Seattle Flu Study was an ambitious and unique idea, and it had a chance to make progress on some of the problems I had called out in my TED talk years before. I agreed to fund it through the Brotman Baty Institute, a research partnership between Fred Hutch, the University of Washington, and Seattle Children’s. The team quickly got to work on the infrastructure they had envisioned. They created a system to develop and prove a new diagnostic test, process and share the results, and perform quality checks to make sure all the work was valid.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He said how important it was to show up, to stand up—lauding my effort. I just thought it was fun to be that guy in a class of hungover undergrads. It wasn’t that I thought I might get better grades, but I figured I had two legs, so why the hell not get up and use them? I’d never expected to give a TED talk, let alone at twenty-six years old, but then again I’d never expected to be in Mysore, India, which is where I was in October of 2009 as an attendee of TEDIndia, one of the yearly TED presentations that the organizers host all around the world. A month or so before the conference I was included on a massive e-mail blast from Chris Anderson, curator of the TED Conference, that included this attention-grabbing nugget: It is commonly said that TED attendees are every bit as remarkable as those appearing on stage.

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That’s why at every conference we invite you to consider whether you have something to contribute to the program—and possibly later to the wider TED community, through the TED.com site. So there at my laptop I raised my virtual hand—so to speak—and submitted a pitch for a three-minute talk to TED. These are the palate cleansers in between the more heady and often very emotional eighteen-minute TED talks. I figured I’d better get right to the pitch. Here’s what I wrote: The tale of Mister Splashy Pants: a lesson for nonprofits on the Internet. How Greenpeace took itself a little less seriously and helped start an Internet meme that actually got the Japanese government to call off that year’s humpback whaling expedition.

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But in the right hands, this much-maligned communication tool can actually be incredibly entertaining (and even informative). The problem is, most people don’t understand how to use it, which sets the bar for PowerPoint presentations really low. Here’s my philosophy: lots of big pictures, text, and tons of slides. For my TED talk, I had room for no more than a few words on each slide—and they had to be in 86-point type, minimum. Forty-two slides—a good sign,3 even though it meant I had only a little more than four seconds for each slide. There was going to be a giant TED sign on the stage behind me. This could make or break my public speaking career.

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

It uses blended power in a big, messy, multi-player space. The next story shows how TED blended power to build something more self-contained. OPEN AND CLOSED: HOW TED CHANGED THE WAY IDEAS SPREAD What TED has in common with Tiffany’s Every second of every day, seventeen people start watching a TED Talk. But for more than fifteen years even the biggest TED Talks had an audience of just a few hundred. TED was a small group of fancy people gathering in Long Beach, California, once in a while to hear enchanting lectures about technology, entertainment, and design (hence “TED”). TED, which became an annual conference in 1990, was always a Cheerleader and incubator of new power ideas.

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Think here of the Airbnb super-hosts who set norms for others on the platform, the significant but informal role played by the Black Lives Matter founders, or the most influential volunteer moderators on Reddit, whom we will learn more about in the following chapter. TED, the conference community, is adept at moving its users up the participation scale. To get people in the door, TED asks us to view (consume) its most compelling TED Talks, drawn from its official conferences and TEDx, its locally organized conferences. It then encourages us to share those talks, and even offers viewers a tracker to help them see how many people they’ve reached by sharing—a clever way to increase our sense of agency. Moving up the scale, we are asked to join the TED community and affiliate in a variety of ways, for example by nominating someone for the TED Prize.

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Beautifully shot, effortlessly sharable, and strictly timed to last no longer than eighteen minutes, they are tailor-made, in Anderson’s phrase, “to illuminate, clarify, engage and delight.” (A familiar critique is that TED “dumbs down” important content, though increasingly an eighteen-minute format feels like a pretty generous allocation of attention.) The promise of the TED talk is that you become more interesting by watching them, and you appear smarter to your friends by sharing them. What works so well for TED is that these two user experiences—the ultra-VIP attending the Vancouver conference and the ordinary person sharing one of the talks—rely on a similar set of incentives, just on very different levels.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

All they needed was a lot of video content and an even larger international network of volunteers interested in using their tools. And then a group of volunteer translators who were using other tools to translate TED Talks asked for a chance to use Amara instead. [back] 30. According to the nonprofit organization’s website, the first six TED Talks—highly produced presentations that converge around technology, entertainment, and design—were posted online on June 27, 2006. By September they had reached more than one million views. TED Talks proved so popular that in 2007, TED’s website was relaunched around them, giving a global audience free access to some of the world’s greatest thinkers, leaders, and teachers.

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., 48 Taft-Hartley Act, 48–49, 54, 228 n20 Taste of the World, 14 Taylor, Frederick, 227 n6 Team Genius, 88–90 teamwork, 24, 28, 160–61, 164, 182–83 technology AI. see artificial intelligence (AI) APIs. see application programming interface (API) automation, xviii–xxiii, 173–77, 176–77, 243 n5 computers. see computers machinery, 42, 43–44, 58–59, 227 n5 paradox of automation, xxii, 36, 170, 173, 175 Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED). See TED Talks TED Talks, 27, 113, 152–53, 226 n30 temporary work. See contract (temporary) work terms of agreement, xxiv, 85–86, 88, 93 Tesla, xviii tools and software, 23, 73–74, 180–81 trade guilds, 41–45 tragedy of the commons, 164–65 training of AI, xxiii, 6–8, 16, 170, 222 n11 lack of, 71 on LeadGenius, 23 need for, 182–83, 230 n26 workers commitment to, 87–88 transaction costs, 69–75 defined, 69–70 hypervigilance, 76–80 inequality in, 91–93 isolation and training, 80–84 payment, lack of, 85–91 reduction of through collaboration, 121–28 of requesters, 70–75 up-front costs for workers, 108 of workers, 32, 75–76, 173 translation, 18–19, 153–55, 226 n30 transparency bait-and-switch strategy, 83 need for, 138–39, 180 requesters and, 71 worker misinformation, 134 Treaty of Detroit, 47–48 TripAdvisor, xiii, 14 Truman, Harry, 48 trust, 71–72, 74, 133 TurkerNation, 239 n8 Turkopticon, 223 n18 Twine Health, 167 Twitter, ix, x, xii, xiii, xxi, 17 U Uber Real-Time ID Check, xv–xvi, 35 as single bottom line company, 145–46 study of, xxv worker, view of, 75 worker status, 240 n5 UHRS content moderation, xi corporate firewalls, 16–21 equality in, 115–16 nondisclosure agreements, 224 n21 sharing work on, 128 See also Microsoft underemployment, 95 unions full-time employment and, 60 future of, 188–89 Industrial Revolution, 44 legal right to form, 38, 47, 228 n20 outsourcing and, 55 platforms and, 158–59 United Auto Workers (UAW), 47 United Garment Workers (UGW), 44–45, 47 U.S., the Amazon.com, 1–2 census of, 168 demographics, 169 discrimination, workplace, 113–17, 133 Fair Food Program, 193 map of MTurk participants, figure 1A reasons for ghost work, 96 slavery in, 40–41 underemployment, 95 women and, 106–10 U.S.

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In Spring 2011, not long after PCF released Amara online, activists turned to it to translate videos documenting human rights crises, most notably during the Arab Spring and the Fukushima reactor meltdown. This launched Amara into the limelight. Filmmakers and the nonprofit Technology, Entertainment, and Design, the creators behind TED Talks, approached PCF looking for ways to offer “rush captioning” to media creators and TED presenters who want to caption video for a global audience.30 By mid-2013, PCF Executive Director Nicholas Reville and seasoned technology strategist Aleli Alcala co-founded Amara On Demand (AOD) to fill this niche.

Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Burning Man, business intelligence, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, content marketing, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, double helix, dumpster diving, East Village, fake news, feminist movement, forensic accounting, fudge factor, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, John Darwin disappearance case, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, telemarketer, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

In one experiment, Stanford communications professor Jeff Hancock and his research team paid people to write fake reviews of a hotel in New York. Some of the reviewers had really stayed there; others had never set foot in the place. The liars, he found, focused on narrative. “They make up a story: Who? And what happened? And that’s what happened here,” Hancock said in a 2012 Ted Talk. “Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing. They also used the first-person singular, ‘I,’ way more than the people that actually stayed there. They were inserting themselves into the hotel review, kind of trying to convince you they were there.”12 Those who really had been at the hotel were more concerned with “spatial information”: the size of the bathroom, or how close the hotel was from a shopping center.13 What Hancock deduced is that our language changes based on the type of lie we’re emitting, and our motivations for telling it.

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The financial crisis of 2008 certainly didn’t help; neither do daily headlines about beloved coaches/priests/rabbis/doctors/actors doing terrible things at odds with their public personas. So the best way to protect yourself? Learn how to find a liar. People crave this knowledge. Jeff Hancock’s Ted Talk “The Future of Lying” garnered over 1.2 million views; one by Pamela Meyer, “How to Spot a Liar,” received over 18 million.26 Australian ex-police officer Steve van Aperen (who was “trained by the FBI!” according to his website) sells a series of fifteen instructional videos for $97. Once you complete them, you receive a Master Certificate in Detecting Deception.

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Jennifer Senior, review of Labyrinths: Emma and Carl Jung’s Complex Marriage, New York Times, November 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/books/review-labryinths-emma-and-carl-jungs-complex-marriage.html. Five: A Life Divided 1. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/let31.asp. 2. Jeff Hancock, “The Future of Lying,” Ted Talk, September 2012, https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hancock_3_types_of_digital_lies. 3. Jeffrey T. Hancock, Catalina Toma, and Nicole Ellison, “The Truth About Lying in Online Dating Profiles,” in Proceedings of Computer/Human Interaction (2007): 449–452. 4. Boris Kachka, “Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

It was about the hypermedia work we were doing at Southampton, but I’m also a social linker and I’ve always tried to link the different research communities, such as hypermedia, multimedia, the Web, the Semantic Web and others, to try to be a bit of glue in there that gets everybody talking together. Over my life I’ve found that everything really is deeply “intertwingled” and I’m very proud to say that this is my first Ted Talk. Well, it depends how you parse that. I first heard “TED Talk” in 1989, but I’m calling this my first Ted Talk. Now I’m going to tell you about me because I reckon if I do that Ted can’t say I’m wrong. He could of course challenge the references to how he has inspired my life but I’ll let him do that. This talk is based on a standard talk that I give, but intertwingled with how Ted has inspired my career and my work, and my life generally.

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So around 1986/1987, as I was beginning to find my feet as junior member of faculty, I started working in this new exciting area of multimedia. In 1987 when I read Vannevar Bush’s paper I also began to hear about this ‘new’ idea called hypertext. I began to hear about Ted and Doug Engelbart, both of whom equally inspired me: Ted talking about everything being deeply intertwingled, and Doug, talking about augmenting the human intellect. Again, I don’t need to tell this audience about these two men. When I give talks to a non-expert audience I always include reference to them because it was their ideas—I hadn’t met them at this point—that inspired me.

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And we could, maybe, have different links for different people, so that if school children wanted to find out about something that was in the archive they would get different links to historians who were looking for evidence of what had happened when and why. As I was mulling these ideas over, I was lucky enough to have a 6 month sabbatical at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1989, and this is when I first heard Ted talk at a Computers in the Humanities conference in Toronto. He was the keynote speaker. I was spellbound. I bought a copy of his book Literary Machines [5], and he signed it for me. We didn’t really get talking at that conference but the book became my hypertext bible. I taught from it. I learned about hypertext and Ted’s definition of the link and everything about Xanadu, tumblers, transclusions, micropayments and much, much more.

Do Improvise: Less push. More pause. Better results. A new approach to work (and life) (Do Books) by Poynton, Robert

Berlin Wall, complexity theory, Gene Kranz, Hans Rosling, iterative process, off grid, Skype, TED Talk, Toyota Production System

Their attention and engagement cuts off suddenly, just like the edge of the stage. Using the Audience Requirements Grid is a way to keep you away from that edge. I don’t mean to say that the role of content in a presentation is irrelevant. Good slides can lift things and great material can, occasionally, carry the day. For example, there is a magnificent TED talk (see www.ted.com) by statistician Hans Rosling whose animated visualisation of data is stunning. But these animations were the result of decades of work. And, realising that there is more to presentations than good data, at the end, Rosling strips off to reveal a spandex vest and goes on to swallow a sword (or to be more accurate, a 19th-century Swedish infantry bayonet).

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Have frequent breaks, move furniture, disturb the physical layout so that people can’t stay put, sit somewhere else yourself (to create a domino effect) or break them into groups or pairs for conversations. Variation and physical movement helps people stay alert as well as increasing the chances of them having a new idea. A beautiful example of the power of movement (and being playful) is a TED talk by John Bohannon called ‘Dance your PHD’. In a moment of playfulness a scientist invited some dancers to help him communicate his ideas physically. What starts off as an irreverent means of illustrating ideas turns, quite unexpectedly, into something far more powerful. In order to bring the ideas to life, the dancers, with their focus on the physical body, have a very different point of view to the scientists and started to ask questions that none of researchers would ever have thought of.

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48–9 your own baggage (shadow story) and 42 complexity theory 118 ‘connective tissue’ 99 control: changing attitudes towards 116–17 companies which give employees 121–3 exerting influence without 31 imposing in areas where it isn’t appropriate 9, 11 as neither sensible or desirable 30 new ideas and 79§ paying attention to what you can 12, 52, 113–14 creativity 65–88 all creativity is co-creativity 85–6 and solving future world problems 66 creative doing, not creative thinking 72–6 creative process 67 ‘creativity is the new literacy’ 85 embracing constraint and 80–6 Game: Object Taps 87–8 importance of 66, 85–6 importance of play 69–72 ‘last letter, first letter’ 80, 81 popular image of 66–8 putting flow first 77–80 sets humans apart 85 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 66 ‘Dance Your Ph.D’ (TED talk) 76 discomfort, accepting 10, 94, 96 eatbigfish 20, 138 Edison, Thomas 102 education 30, 114 either/or, seeing things as 114 Everything’s An Offer (EAO) 17, 18 ‘Facebook effect, the’ 23 ‘fit and well’ 35, 102 Fleming, Alexander 70 flexibility 90–1, 107, 121 future-proof 30, 101 games, killer 12–13, 27–8, 32, 33–8, 59–64, 78, 79, 81–2, 87–8, 99, 108–11, 112, 117, 118, 120, 125–37, 138 see also under individual game name General Motors 103 Gore Associates 121 Heifetz, Professor Ronald 107 Hirsch, Gary 27, 38, 45–6, 49, 61, 71, 88, 111, 118 Hollywood 67, 89, 93–4 Honda 122–3 ideas, generating new 10, 12, 70, 87, 88, 113 acting first 72–6 constraint and 80–6 creating a flow of 31 finding in areas your competitors don’t notice 20, 21, 22–5 flow and 77–80 games and see games in spite of how things are organised, not because of them 116 leaders and see leadership new ideas as combinations of old ones, re-expressed 14 play and 69–72 practice and 94, 95, 96 re-designing organisations and 121 using other people’s 98–100 IDEO 75 IKEA 28, 102–3, 111 image bank 85 improv in action 112–24 analysis, nature of 113–15 building into the design of an organization 119–23 education and 114 either/or ‘yes, and...’ 114 enthusiasm for taking things to pieces and 115–16 journeys and 115 order without control 113, 116–17 planning and 114–15 improv theatre 31, 112, 119 improvisation, nature of 8–13 incorporations (game) 135–7 intuition/hunch 30, 100, 101, 115, 123 journeys, improv and 115 Kamprad, Ingvar 28, 102–3 Keating, David 42–3 Kelleher, Herb 85 knee-jerk conclusions/reaction, resisting 18, 23–4 Kranz, Gene 100 leadership 89–111 accepting discomfort and 94, 95 distributed 91–2 ‘fit and well’ 102 flexibility and 107 fluid approach to 90–1 focus on your own experience 93 Game: Swedish Story 108–11 intuition/hunch and 100, 101, 123 level of trust in 99 looking for offers 101–3 mistakes and 93–4, 95, 102–3 new ideas and 98–9 no single leader 89–92 paying attention to others and 97–8, 99–100 practice and 93, 94–6 presence and 96–7 status and 104–6 value ‘connective tissue’ 99 Let Go 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–5, 29, 34–5, 55, 56, 70, 84, 91, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129 listening 20, 21, 29, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 55–6, 60, 62, 81, 96–8, 107 Mandela, Nelson 97 Michelangelo 79 mistakes 26, 27, 54, 93–4, 95, 101, 102–3, 105, 113, 114–15, 123, 127 Morgan, Adam 20, 42, 51 Morning Star 121–2 Nike 48 ‘no’, saying 28, 42, 51, 54 Notice More 15, 16, 17, 18–22, 35, 81, 96–7, 119 Object Taps (game) 87–8 offer/offers: blocking 37, 40–2, 54, 56–7, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 76, 78–80, 103, 120 errors and mistakes as 26–8, 103 Everything’s An Offer (EAO) 16, 17, 18, 26, 102–3 failure and breakdowns as 28–9 seeing objections as 56–7, 101–3 On Your Feet 38, 49, 71, 82, 84, 119, 122 One to Twenty (game) 125, 131–4 Pascale, Richard 122–3 paying attention 19, 22, 24, 96–8, 99–100 Pert, Candace 22 planning 9, 51–2, 62, 63, 81, 113, 114–15 practice, improvisational 12, 13, 14–31 Let Go 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–5, 29, 34–5, 55, 56, 70, 84, 91, 96, 101, 117, 119, 122, 125, 127, 129 Notice More 15, 16, 17, 18–22, 35, 81, 96–7, 119 Presents (game) 33–8, 62, 63, 111, 129 Use Everything 15–16, 17, 18, 26–9, 96, 119 presentations 39, 44–58 Presents (game) 33–8, 62, 63, 111, 129 Robinson, Sir Ken 85, 86 Rodriguez, Robert 28 Roshi, Suzuki 27 Rosling, Hans 53 SCRUM 119 Semco 121 senses 18–21, 76, 96 shadow story 24–5, 42, 56 Sloan, Alfred 103 software engineers 119–20 Southwest Airlines 85 status 49, 104–6, 107 storyteller improv games 27–8, 99, 108–11 Swedish Story (game) 108–11 taking things to pieces, enthusiasm for 8, 18, 29, 30, 113, 115–16 TED talks 53, 76 3M 121 Toyota Production System 91 Twain, Mark 54 Use Everything 15–16, 17, 18, 26–9, 35, 96, 119 Wake Wood (film) 42–3 weak signals 99–100 ‘whites of the eyes’ 46 ‘Yes, and’ (game) 59–64, 78 ‘yes, and...’, seeing things as 11, 42, 98, 114, 120 Published by The Do Book Company 2013 Works in Progress Publishing Ltd www.thedobook.co Text copyright © Robert Poynton 2013 Illustrations copyright © Andy Smith 2012 The right of Robert Poynton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced to a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown

Black Lives Matter, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, place-making, Sheryl Sandberg, TED Talk

BY BRENÉ BROWN Braving the Wilderness Rising Strong Daring Greatly The Gifts of Imperfection I Thought It Was Just Me ABOUT THE AUTHOR ••• BRENÉ BROWN, PHD, LMSW, is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation–Brené Brown Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past sixteen years studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, and is the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers: The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong. Her TED talk—“The Power of Vulnerability”—is one of the top five most-viewed TED talks in the world, with more than thirty million views. Brown lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve, and their children, Ellen and Charlie. BreneBrown.com Facebook.com/BreneBrown Twitter: @BreneBrown What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read!

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He will eat his snack as he does every day, then we will play as we do every day, and all his life this little boy will defy you by being happy and free. Because you will not have his hate either. Courage is forged in pain, but not in all pain. Pain that is denied or ignored becomes fear or hate. Anger that is never transformed becomes resentment and bitterness. I love what Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi says in his 2015 TED talk: Anger is within each one of you, and I will share a secret for a few seconds: that if we are confined in the narrow shells of egos, and the circles of selfishness, then the anger will turn out to be hatred, violence, revenge, destruction. But if we are able to break the circles, then the same anger could turn into a great power.

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CHAPTER 4 “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates”: James A. Baldwin, “Me and My House,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1955, 54–61. “You will not have my hate”: Antoine Leiris, Facebook post, November 16, 2015 (translated from the French). facebook.com/antoine.leiris/posts/10154457849999947. “Anger is within each one of you”: Kailash Satyarthi, TED talk, March 2015. ted.com/talks/kailash_satyarthi_how_to_make_peace_get_angry?language=en The price is high. The reward is great: Bill Moyers, “A Conversation with Maya Angelou,” Bill Moyers Journal, original series, Public Broadcasting System, first aired November 21, 1973. “Dehumanization is a way of subverting those inhibitions”: David L.

The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want by Diane Mulcahy

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, deliberate practice, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, fear of failure, financial independence, future of work, gig economy, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, mass immigration, mental accounting, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, passive income, Paul Graham, remote working, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social contagion, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the strength of weak ties, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, wage slave, WeWork, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Robinson, Joe, “The Secret to Increased Productivity: Taking Time Off,” Entrepreneur, September 24, 2014. www.entrepreneur.com/article/237446 12. Sahadi, Jeanne, “These People Took Months Off . . . And it Paid Off Big Time,” CNN Money, September 12, 2014. money.cnn.com/2014/09/12/pf/time-off-sabbaticals/ 13. Chen, Winston, “Leave Work for a Year to Go Live on a Remote Island? How a TED Talk Inspired Me to Take a Mid-Career Sabbatical,” TED Blog, July 8, 2014. blog.ted.com/how-a-ted-talk-inspired-me-to-take-a-mid-career-sabbatical/ 14. Merchant, Nilofer, “In Between Space,” July 24, 2014. nilofermerchant.com/2014/07/24/in-between-space/ CHAPTER 7 1. Society for Human Resource Management, “SHRM Survey Findings 2014: Workplace Flexibility: Overview of Flexible Work Arrangements,” October 15, 2014. www.shrm.org/research/surveyfindings/articles/pages/2014-workplace-flexibility-survey.aspx 2.

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The Timeline of Success The time frame we set to realize our goals influences whether we achieve our vision of success. We might not be able to start our own small business and write our debut novel next year, but we can probably accomplish one, or even both, during the next five years. Nigel Marsh illustrated this concept best during his popular TED talk “How to Make Work-Life Balance Work.”15 He emphasized the importance of selecting the right time horizon for evaluating whether we achieve work/life balance. He noted that “a day is too short; ‘after I retire’ is too long. There’s got to be a middle way.” Marsh’s point is that the time frame we pick to accomplish our goals can impact whether we achieve them or not.

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You shift from being the person writing the comments to the person receiving them. Inbound Connect Through Speaking Susan Cain is an introvert. She is the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, and her “bliss” is writing, researching, and reading. Yet she is the speaker of one of the most popular TED talks, with over 13 million views. How did she do it? As she describes it, she overcame her lifelong fear of public speaking (which many of us share) by spending a year training and practicing.4 She calls it her “year of speaking dangerously,” and it involved Toastmasters, coaching, and practicing every chance she could.

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

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

Along the way, TED has gone from an annual gathering of dilettantes to one of the world’s most popular and influential forums for the exchange of ideas. Now, let’s look at this program from an ExO perspective. From the beginning, as first elucidated by Wurman, TED had both an appealing and scalable MTP: “Ideas Worth Spreading.” When Anderson turned the TED talks into free online content, he created Engagement and quickly built the critical mass needed to turn Crowd into Community. The TED talks also leveraged the exponential nature of cloud services (Leveraged Assets). At the same time, the franchise format of TEDx, supported by the toolkit, created a scalable set of optimized processes that allowed this newly created Community to build the organization outside the traditional, formal boundaries of its reporting lines.

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Despite its rapid growth, however, TED never compromised on the excellence of content or the quality of the attendee experience that made it so great in the first place. Let’s look at how the ExO attributes were implemented: MTP: “Ideas Worth Spreading” Community & Crowd: Leverage the TED community for TEDx events. TED talks have turned millions of casual members into community. Algorithms: Used to gauge which TED talks to promote on main site. Interfaces: Fixed rules about how to create a TEDx event. Dashboards: Live statistics on TEDx events globally. Experimentation: Different formats tried and evaluated (e.g., within corporations). Example 2: GitHub Ever since Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991 and first established the “open source” paradigm, a vast global community has been steadily creating new software for millions of applications.

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The table below shows some ExOs and their interfaces: Uber Interface: Driver selection Description: System to allow users to find and choose drivers Internal Usage: Algorithm matches best/closest driver to user location SCALE Attribute: Algorithm Kaggle Interface: Leaderboard rankings Description: Real-time scoreboard that shows the current rankings of a contest Internal Usage: Aggregate and compare results of all users in a contest SCALE Attribute: Engagement Interface: User scanning Description: System to scan for relevant users for private contests Internal Usage: Cherry-pick the best users for special projects SCALE Attribute: Community & Crowd Quirky Interface: Ratings/voting Description: System to vote on each aspect of the production cycle Internal Usage: Priorities in the features and benefits of new products SCALE Attribute: Engagement TED Interface: Video translation subtitles Description: Manage translations created by volunteers (via the vendor dotsub) Internal Usage: Integrate TED Talks translations seamlessly SCALE Attribute: Community & Crowd Local Motors Interface: Idea submitter Description: System to allow users to submit ideas Internal Usage: Algorithm to process only valid or feasible entries SCALE Attribute: Community & Crowd Interface: Competition creator Description: System to create new competitions for the community Internal Usage: Algorithms to streamline all steps in the competition SCALE Attribute: Community & Crowd Interface: Ratings/voting Description: System to vote on each aspect of the production cycle Internal Usage: Priorities in the features and benefits of new products SCALE Attribute: Engagement Google Ventures Interface: Employee search Description: Search relevant and targeted skills/people in Google’s employee database Internal Usage: Match GV startups with targeted Google skills/employees SCALE Attribute: Algorithms Interface: Resume search Description: System to search resumes to find relevant new hires Internal Usage: Match resumes with specific skill sets SCALE Attribute: Algorithms Waze Interface: GPS coordinates Description: Harvests GPS signal from every user Internal Usage: Traffic delays calculated in real time SCALE Attribute: Leveraged Assets Interface: User gestures while driving Description: Users spot accidents, police car sightings, etc.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

The bigger display with a wider array of jams attracted more customers but very few of them actually bought jam. The display that offered fewer choices inspired more sales.1 The counterintuitive result went viral—it hit a sweet spot. People respond better to fewer choices! It became the stuff of pop-psychology articles, books, and TED Talks. It was unexpected yet seemed plausible. Few people would have predicted it, and yet somehow those who heard about it felt they’d known it all along. As an economist, I’ve always found this a little strange. Economic theory predicts that people should often value extra choices, and will never be discouraged by them—but economic theory can be wrong, so that’s not what was curious about the jam study.

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Alex Reinhart pieced together the manuscript and various documents pertaining to the project: Reinhart, “The History of ‘How to Lie with Smoking Statistics,’” October 4, 2014, https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html. 20. Suzana Herculano-Houzel, “What Is So Special about the Human Brain?,” TED Talk, 2013: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain/transcript?ga_source=embed&ga_medium=embed&ga_campaign=embedT. 21. On Galileo’s telescope: “Refusing to Look,” The Renaissance Mathematicus (blog), August 23, 2012, https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/refusing-to-look/; and Ryan D.

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Author calculations, based on Natsal-3, the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles: http://timharford.com/2018/09/is-twitter-more-unequal-than-life-sex-or-happiness/. 10. Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Tiger That Isn’t (London: Profile Books, 2008). 11. Andrew C. A. Elliott, Is That a Big Number? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 12. Tali Sharot, “The Optimism Bias,” TED Talk, 2012, https://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias/transcript#t-18026. 13. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). 14. Ross A. Miller and Karen Albert, “If It Leads, It Bleeds (and If It Bleeds, It Leads): Media Coverage and Fatalities in Militarized Interstate Disputes,” Political Communication 32, no. 1 (2015), 61–82, DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2014.880976; Barbara Combs and Paul Slovic, “Newspaper Coverage of Causes of Death,” Journalism Quarterly 56, no. 4 (1979), 837–43, 849. 15.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The study was published in Psychological Science and has been cited more than 1,400 times. A TED talk on power posing has been viewed more than sixty-seven million times. Subsequent studies found no evidence of hormonal changes or risk tolerance, the key findings of the study, and the first author of the original study has since disavowed the results.28 • A series of studies and scientific papers in the late 1980s and early 1990s touted the idea that “mastery orientation,” which is now known as “growth mindset,” helps people overcome adversity. A 2006 book and 2014 TED talk (viewed by more than fourteen million people) brought this work to the mainstream.

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Here are a few examples: • A 2003 study with only 17 participants reported that playing first-person shooter video games improved performance on laboratory cognitive tasks. It was published in Nature, has been cited more than 3,500 times, and was followed by extensive popular media coverage, including a TED talk that has been viewed more than eight million times. Independent replications by other labs generally find far smaller effects, and meta-analyses that correct for selective publication show little or no benefit.27 • A 2010 study of 42 participants reported that those who held their bodies in two separate “power poses” for one minute each subsequently had increased testosterone levels, decreased cortisol levels, greater risk tolerance, and stronger feelings of power than those in a control group.

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As the psychologist Stuart Ritchie notes, advocates have claimed vast implications of adopting a growth mindset: Possessing one constitutes a “basic human right” and might even help resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet a recent meta-analysis shows little evidence that brief interventions designed to instill a growth mindset have any real effect on academic performance, the main focus of the mindset movement.29 When an initial finding leads to news headlines, popular books, and TED talks, it will remain widely believed long after scientists know its limitations. That’s why a single incredible result (or even a series of them) from a single research team should rarely drive policy. THE YOUNGMAN TEST Henny Youngman, the comedian known as “the King of the One-Liners,” liked to say, “Someone asked me ‘How’s your wife?’

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

I’ve never seen poor people hire many people’.33 Wealthy individuals who disagree with Fries’s views on taxation often find themselves unwelcome at TED events. In 2012, a millionaire entrepreneur and tech investor named Nick Hanauer – he made a windfall as an early Amazon investor – gave a TED presentation that expressed a starkly different view from Fries. His TED talk called for more progressive tax measures. He also lambasted the notion that entrepreneurs are society’s primary ‘wealth creators’. In his words, ‘Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it.

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A 2015 article in Maclean’s suggested, for example, that Bill Gates’s ‘tight focus on concrete measures and defined results’ distinguishes his work from earlier, government-sponsored aid and welfare programmes.56 The most influential academic to emphasize this perception of the foundation is Peter Singer, a controversial Australian philosopher who has praised Gates and Warren Buffett for being the ‘most effective altruists in history’. During a TED talk in 2013, Singer pointed to a screenshot and said, ‘This is the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, “All lives have equal value”. That’s the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett’.57 When it comes to public education in the US, there’s little indication yet that many of the initiatives the foundation has spearheaded have in fact been positive for students.

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Chan praised their comments, provoking an attendee to stand up and ask whether the relationship presented a conflict of interest for the WHO. Chan, never a wallflower, responded by launching into song – a show tune from the musical The King and I, ‘Getting to Know You’.39 The Gates Foundation has championed the idea that Coca-Cola should be upheld as a key partner in global health policy-making. In 2010, Melinda Gates gave a TED talk titled ‘What Non-profits Can Learn from Coca-Cola,’ where she exhorted development experts to adopt the beverage giant’s distribution strategies. On its own, the suggestion seems fairly commonplace, even commendable. Gates pointed out that Coca-Cola is able to supply its beverages in highly remote areas where health practitioners often have difficulty transporting medicines.

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

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

Quiet was named the best book of the year by Fast Company magazine, which also named Susan one of its “Most Creative People in Business.” Susan is the co-founder of the Quiet Schools Network and the Quiet Leadership Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Her TED Talk has been viewed more than 17 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks. * * * How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? Many, many moons ago, I used to be a corporate lawyer. I was an ambivalent corporate lawyer at best, and anyone could have told you that I was in the wrong profession, but still: I’d dedicated tons of time (three years of law school, one year of clerking for a federal judge, and six and a half years at a Wall Street firm, to be exact) and had lots of deep and treasured relationships with fellow attorneys.

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Matt Ridley TW: @mattwridley mattridley.co.uk MATT RIDLEY is a prominent author whose books have sold more than a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. They include The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, Genome, Nature via Nurture, Francis Crick, The Rational Optimist (one of the most recommended books by others in this book), and The Evolution of Everything. His TED Talk “When Ideas Have Sex” has been viewed more than two million times. He writes a weekly column in The Times (London) and writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal. As Viscount Ridley, he was elected to England’s House of Lords in February 2013. * * * What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why?

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Tim has gained a number of prominent readers as well, like authors Sam Harris and Susan Cain, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, TED curator Chris Anderson, and Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova. Tim’s series of posts after interviewing Elon Musk have been called by Vox’s David Roberts “the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I’ve read in ages.” You can start with the first one, “Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man.” Tim’s TED Talk, “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator,” has received more than 21 million views. * * * What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, because of the two main characters in the book—Howard Roark and Peter Keating.

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

Take, for example, LifeEdited, a Web site and product design and real estate development firm anchored by a philosophy that advocates for reducing clutter, extra space, and extra material goods (its slogan: “Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy”). The company’s founder, Graham Hill, previously founded Treehugger.com, one of the earliest Web sites to focus on what would become the “green” movement, and for the past few years has turned his focus on this new venture. In a TED talk introducing the LifeEdited philosophy, Hill explains our obsession with stuff (while sitting on a box of stuff) and asks the audience to “consider the benefits of an edited life.” We have triple the amount of space per person we did fifty years ago, he points out, and a $22 billion, 2.2-billion-square-foot storage industry for all our stuff—and it’s time to pare it back.

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Louis, Missouri; big commercial builders are now replicating their concepts. ©2010 Minnesota Historical Society Anti-sprawl activists point to street design at the turn of the century as the ideal. Chuck Marohn, founder of StrongTowns.org, uses this picture of Brainerd, Minnesota, in 1905 in his TED talk to demonstrate a street “that rocks.” ©Michelle Wolfe Photography Morristown, New Jersey, has given its downtown a dose of urban chic, adding penthouse loft apartments, boutiques, restaurants, and a walkable promenade. Nancy McLinden/ Pink Olive Photography In Libertyville, Illinois, John McLinden developed School Street, a neighborhood of twenty-six houses in dense arrangement just off the town’s Main Street.

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In addition to his books, which also include The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove Press, 2006), and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012), Kunstler weighs in weekly on his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, at Kunstler.com/blog/. A TED talk he gave in 2004 is viewable at ted.com and well worth the nineteen minutes. CHAPTER TWO: THE MASTER-PLANNED AMERICAN DREAM “Some rich men came and raped the land”: Words and music by Don Henley and Glenn Frey © 1976 Cass County Music and Red Cloud Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

,” The New York Times, October 13, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/what-do-we-owe-the-future/. 32. Sarah Gray, “Walter Isaacson: ‘Innovation’ Doesn’t Mean Anything Anymore,” Salon.com, August 5, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/08/05/walter_isaacson_innovation_doesnt_mean_anything_anymore/. 33. Thomas Frank, “TED Talks Are Lying to You,” Salon.com, October 13, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/ted_talks_are_lying_to_you/. 34. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011). 35. “Time Person of the Year,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, April 13, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Time_Person_of_the_Year&oldid=656202490. 36.

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“Whereas Friedrich Nietzsche bemoaned the surplus of historical sense, crushing old Europe under the weight of its past, we are now suffering from an obsession with what lies ahead.”31 “The word ‘innovation’ has become a buzzword and it’s been drained of much of its meaning,” notes bestselling Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson.32 All around us, writes critic Thomas Frank, there are “TED talks on how to be a creative person.” There are “‘Innovation Jams’ at which IBM employees brainstorm collectively over a global hookup,” and “‘Thinking Out of the Box’ desktop sculptures for sale at Sam’s Club.”33 Language matters. Language shapes how we see things. A famous psychology experiment provides insight into the way words and ideas on the surface enter our collective mental infrastructure.

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The message of the XPrize Foundation is as unambiguous as its crowdsourcing marketing exercises: this is how you get to the future. Ten years ago, we might have dismissed the XPrize as an outsized personal obsession, an outlier that doesn’t actually represent any kind of systemic change in how we think about future collectively and individually. After all, XPrize founder Diamandis is a pundit, speaker, TED Talk regular, and author of iconic Silicon Valley text Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. In other words, he’s a professional future-first prophet—someone who has made a career out of preaching that creativity leashed to science and technology will solve our problems. (I get his mass e-mails for “abundance-minded thinkers” complete with pithy zingers like “Women, we’re entering your age of abundance.

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

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

If someone gives you a cup of icy cold water8 to hold, then introduces you to a stranger, as researchers at Yale did, you’ll treat this newcomer with suspicion and rate them as colder and more distant on personality scales. But if they give you a cup of hot coffee and make the same introduction, trust comes more easily. The act of feeling physical warmth is enough to trigger a cognitive change: you literally warm up to people, no thinking required. Or consider Harvard psychologist Amy9 Cuddy’s popular TED talk about the power of body language. Cuddy discovered that spending two minutes in a “power pose”—meaning a posture of dominance (like “Wonder Woman”: hands on hips, elbows cocked wide, legs firmly planted)—changed both psychology and physiology. In her research, subjects who adopted the Wonder Woman posture took greater risks and took them more frequently.

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Typically, what gets bypassed on an ecstatic path are the mundane dissatisfactions of regular life. If those dissatisfactions are too intense, non-ordinary states can offer a tempting escape. But rather than bypassing these challenges, we can accept them and even draw power from them. This response has a paradoxical name: vulnerable strength. Brené Brown, whose books and TED talks on the subject have resonated with massive audiences, explains it this way: “Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving27 up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

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During the states we’re describing: There’s obviously a ton of information on this one, but especially relevant are Arne Dietrich, “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness,” Conscious Cognition, June 12, 2003, pp. 231–56; Matthieu Ricard and Richard Davidson, “Neuroscience Reveals the Secret of Meditation’s Benefit,” Scientific American, November 1, 2014; J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Kotler, The Rise of Superman; and C. Robert Cloninger, Feeling Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Also see Arne Dietrich’s excellent TED talk, “Surfing the Stream of Consciousness,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syfalikXBLA. 24. The knobs and levers being tweaked in the brain: See www.flowgenomeproject.com/stealingfiretools. 25. “We’re a very high-performing club”: Author interview with Rich Davis and other team leaders (who have likewise needed to remain anonymous), 2013. 26. researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly: Float tank histories are everywhere, but to hear John Lilly tell it, see John Lilly, The Scientist (Berkeley, CA: Ronin, 1996), pp. 98–108. 27.

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

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

I came across this quote in Maria Popova, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Thoughts on Learning,” Atlantic, June 8, 2012; excerpted from Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, Nature, and the Human Spirit: A Collection of Quotations (Portland, OR: Pomegranate, 2011). 3 Mark Noonan, who once, after suffering . . . From my 2009 interview with Noonan, originally for the book Glimmer. 4 “We think someone else—someone smarter . . .” From Regina Dugan’s March 2012 TED talk, “From Mach 20 Glider to Humming-bird Drone,” http://www.ted.com/talks/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_glider_to_humming_bird_drone.html. 5 “are the engines of intellect . . .” David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Thank you to Bill Welter for bringing this to my attention. 6 “shine a light on where you need . . .”

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Drawn from the website Massmoments.org, which drew from “Percy Spencer and His Itch to Know,” by Don Murray in Readers’ Digest (August 1958); “Raytheon: A History of Global Technology Leadership” (Early Days link); and “Who Invented Microwaves?” from Gallawa.com. 35 Sugata Mitra, made just this point . . . Mitra’s TED talk was “Build a School in the Cloud,” February 27, 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html. Also, see the article “Is Education Obsolete? Sugata Mitra at the MIT Media Lab,” posted on the blog MIT Center for Civic Media, May 16, 2012; as this post shows, the idea of “knowing” being obsolete was suggested by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, in a class discussion following Mitra’s lecture at MIT. 36 “when someone looks at the way things . . .”

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Jessica Salter, “Airbnb: The Story behind the $1.3bn Room-letting Website,” Telegraph, September 7, 2012. 25 “it creates dissonance,” notes Paul Bottino . . . From my interview with Bottino. 26 Why can’t India have 911 emergency service? . . . From my interview with Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund; plus, Shaffi Mather’s November 2009 TED Talk, “A New Way to Fight Corruption.” http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html 27 The five whys methodology originated . . . Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1988). Also, Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (New York: Crown Business, 2011). 28 IDEO example of five whys . . .

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

At the same time, it’s worth auditing and increasing the quality of dots you consume regularly. The most creative and productive people defend their attentional space religiously, allowing only the most valuable dots to be encoded. So how do you measure the value of a dot? First, the most valuable dots are both useful and entertaining—like a TED talk. Useful dots stay relevant for a long time and are also practical. Their entertainment value makes you more engaged as you consume them. While it’s fairly easy to tell if something’s entertaining, there are several ways to measure how useful it is. Useful information is typically actionable and helps you reach your goals.

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However powerful our brains are as dot-connecting machines, consuming exclusively nonentertaining material can quickly become a chore. That’s why it’s also important to seek out balanced dots—information that is both useful and entertaining. Countless things fit into this category, including novels, podcasts, documentaries, and TED talks. The entertainment value of this information makes it easier to become engrossed in it, and as a result, we’re more likely to continue consuming it and become actively involved with the information it provides. Finally, there’s the bottom third of what we consume: information that’s entertaining or, at worst, trashy.

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Or you love listening to audiobooks about productivity (I plead guilty). Double down on developing the skills and knowledge that you find entertaining. Also opt for the medium you prefer—if you learn best by listening, try consuming audiobooks instead of physical books; if you prefer visuals, try watching TED talks instead of listening to an audiobook. 2. Eliminate some trash. Passively consuming pointless trash adds nothing to your life. Choose two items that don’t bring you genuine enjoyment, and eliminate them entirely. Look out for material that, while stimulating in the moment, doesn’t leave you satisfied afterward.

The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon

Bernie Madoff, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gregor Mendel, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, personalized medicine, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, TED Talk, theory of mind

Within a couple of days, in late August, I received two e-mails, and then two calls. These were from head science correspondent Gautam Naik of the Wall Street Journal, and Simon Mirren, executive producer and writer of the TV crime series Criminal Minds on CBS. They both wanted to pursue aspects of what they had seen in the TED talk. After several conversations by phone and e-mail, it was abundantly clear these two gents were quick studies and at least as bright as my academic colleagues. But unlike academics I knew, these two gentlemen moved fast. Gautam Naik arranged to fly from New York to Southern California in late October, and hang out for several days with my family and me, at my home, the lab, and an Angels baseball game.

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Within a week he had already worked out a story line for the ninety-ninth episode of Criminal Minds (“Outfoxed”). I couldn’t believe what he said to me in our second conversation. He had already merged the story line of the serial killer of the episode, basically at high risk to become a psychopathic murderer even as a young child, with the scientific hypothesis I had discussed in my TED talk. He had managed to understand my concept of how the decades and centuries of violence in the Balkans and high-risk genetics would give rise to transgenerational violence and produce a serial killer. And he added the twist that the serial killer turned out to be a woman who beat the odds and had the high-risk MAOA gene variant on both X chromosomes, and had experienced severe violence in her youth.

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So my idea that I should have been a very violent person if genes and organic brain state dictate function, combined with the fact that I wasn’t, meant I would have to eat a lot of crow in front of my neuroscience colleagues who were fifty-fifty types in the nature-nurture metric. This was not going to be fun. The ribbing and eye-rolling and teasing from my colleagues didn’t materialize, to my face at any rate. What happened was worse. Colleagues contacted me, but it was out of concern. “Jim,” my friend Samantha said, “I saw your TED talk video, and did you notice that your orbital cortex and ventral temporal lobe are turned completely off?” On a PET scan, lack of activity can look like lack of brain matter, so my neuroscientist colleague Jeffrey said, “Man, you’ve got a lot of empty space there. Do you have large ventricles?” referring to the brain’s fluid-filled pockets.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

California and New York are the most common origins, but there are partners from several European countries (PiggyBee is Belgian, Blablacar is French, Carpooling is German, Swapsee is Spanish, ParkAtMyHouse is British), from Australasia (Zookal, Airtasker), as well as from Israel (EatWith, CasaVersa), South Africa, and Turkey. This diversity, this range of small and neighborhood-focused organizations, is why the Sharing Economy has appealed to the ecologically minded and to those who identify with artisans. It’s why author Rachel Botsman can describe the Sharing Economy this way in a TED talk: At its core, it’s about empowerment. It’s about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we’ve lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transaction.1 It’s also why stories in the mainstream press tended to start off with the quirky and personal.

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As we have already seen, it was involved in founding Peers through its executive Douglas Atkin. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ What’s Mine Is Yours1 was an important book for the Sharing Economy, setting out a vision that has helped to define the movement. The book opens with the story of Airbnb’s beginnings, and Botsman also looks to Airbnb to set the tone for her TED talk on sharing. When leading public commentators like New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas Friedman write about the Sharing Economy, they look to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. And Chesky speaks out about the values of sharing; in March 2014 he wrote a photo-heavy manifesto-like short essay called “Shared City,” which started like this: Imagine if you could build a city that is shared.

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Reputation is effective only if the testimonies are impartial and free from the taint of collusion or retaliation. Testimony from John’s brother does not carry the same weight as that of someone who has no stake in John’s success or failure. John may not want my neighbor to tell me about his failure to fix their sing, but there’s not a lot he can do about private conversations over a garden fence. In her TED talk, influential author Rachel Botsman says that in the new economy “reputation will be your most valuable asset,” but thinking of reputation as an asset is a dangerous path to take. Markets grow around assets, and these markets undermine the impartiality on which reputation relies. Intermediaries such as reputation.com will help you boost your reputation, for a fee, but why would you trust a reputation that has been paid for?

You Are What You Read by Jodie Jackson

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

The prevalence and pursuit of extraordinarily negative stories in the press can give the appearance that we are going backwards, and most of us are left believing that the world is getting worse. Hans Rosling, a Swedish statistician and renowned public speaker, founded an organisation called Gapminder with his son Ola Rosling and Ola’s wife Anna, which addresses the negative news bias. In Hans’ inspiring and insightful TED Talk ‘The best stats you’ve ever seen’, he shares the results of an original study he conducted among Swedish university students called ‘the chimpanzee test’.10 In this experiment, he offered the students five pairs of countries, consisting of one Asian country and one European country, and asked them to select which performed better on a number of health measures, such as child mortality rates.

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It has been well evidenced throughout history that moments of great social progress and peace-building initiatives have been born from anger. Kailash Satyarthi, a children’s rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, makes a compelling case for anger and outrage to be considered necessary components of the peace-making process. In his 2015 TED Talk, he spoke about moments of injustice that he witnessed, like poverty, child prostitution and violence, and recognised that his reaction to these events was anger. He goes on to reflect how society teaches us to deal with anger; it is categorised as inherently bad and must be either controlled or suppressed.

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Lara Setrakian, a former journalist at ABC News, founded a website in 2012 called Syria Deeply as a result of her concern that in-depth reporting was in danger. This news platform was built to go in depth and provide clarity, understanding and context to the conflict in Syria. It was created because without this depth, stories become oversimplified and this can lead to the misunderstanding of an issue. In her captivating TED Talk, ‘Three Ways to Fix a Broken News Industry’,6 Lara uses coverage of the Ebola outbreak in 2014 to demonstrate how the public was flooded with information that was simplistic, hysterical, sensational, inaccurate and, in some cases, completely wrong. This is because the news can often replace contextual information that aids understanding with emotional or tragic frames which can distort the reality of the situation taking place.7 The news cycle focused on the thousands of deaths in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, with many news organisations citing government incompetence as the reason for the uncontrolled spread.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist based at the MIT Media Lab in the USA, founded the Algorithmic Justice League, because, as a graduate student, she realised that facial-recognition software hadn’t been trained on darker skin tones – and was especially bad at recognising darker female faces. She’s on a mission to fight bias in machine-learning; what she calls the ‘coded gaze’. And it’s not only ‘gaze’. In-car voice-recognition systems respond well to deeper, likely male voices, with standard accents. Speech scientists building voice-recognition data-sets often use TED talks. 70% of people giving TED talks are white men. This matters, because more and more of our daily lives use speech recognition – and it is estimated that voice-commerce will be an 80 billion dollar business by 2023. Does it need to be a gender binary business? Does it need to keep the world’s default as white men and the rest of us – every woman, and most people of colour – as atypical?

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Women who worked in computing should have been valued and encouraged; they were fired. Women’s neural hardwiring wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they were women. Biology is destiny if you work for the patriarchy. Freelance Programmers, though, was floated on the Stock Market in 1996, making millionaires of 70 of her female staff. (Author’s note: her TED talk is a delight.) * * * What about the USA? The way Silicon Valley tells its own story, it’s a story of guys in garages developing hardware (Steve Jobs), and guys in basements developing software (Bill Gates and Paul Allen). If we take the same starting point of World War Two, what do we find?

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Susan Sellers, 1994 The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone, 1970 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, 2011 Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez, 2019 The I-Ching Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, Cordelia Fine, 2017 (and everything she has written and will write) The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, Gina Rippon, 2019 The Future Isn’t Female Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2002 Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, Marie Hicks, 2017 Algorithims of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Umoja Noble, 2018 The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel, 2016 Let it Go: My Extraordinary Story – from Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist, the memoir of Dame Stephanie Shirley, 2012 (If you don’t have time for this, just find her TED Talk.) Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, 2020 The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy, 1984 Psychology of Crowds, Gustave Le Bon, 1896 Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, 2013 Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen Lewis, 2020 A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf, 1929 Your Computer Is on Fire, various editors, 2021 (haven’t read this at time of going to press but looks great) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker, 2002 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich, 1976 The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women, Sharon Moalem, 2020 Jurassic Car Park Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949 The War of the Worlds, H.

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

If literate man was rational, said McLuhan, then electronic man would be more emotional, aural and tactile. McLuhan’s prescient 50-year-old ‘probes’ (he called his ideas probes) into how technology would change behaviour are still significantly more insightful than almost every ‘thought-provoking’ TED Talk. But McLuhan wasn’t a scientist. He didn’t conduct studies or test theories. Fortunately Daniel Kahneman, the academic most associated with examining bias in human decision-making, did. Through decades of empirical research with long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, he pioneered the study of how we take decisions – and especially irrational ones.

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Having something to protect and a stake in society, this group is repeatedly found in studies to value individual freedom, property rights and democratic accountability more than other groups.11 The emergence of middle-class societies, especially in Europe and America increased the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a political system in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 To see what happens when tech-fuelled inequality takes off, there’s no better place to start than the home of it all, Silicon Valley and its increasingly put-upon neighbour, San Francisco. There are two worlds in Silicon Valley, and they barely ever meet. There’s the exciting start-up open-plan offices, with beanbags, table football, TED Talks and flip-flops, where the region’s half a million tech workers can expect to earn on average well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. (For the biggest companies, the median salary is higher still.) Mostly under 40, they want to live in nearby bustling San Francisco, since Silicon Valley can resemble The Stepford Wives.

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And yet, later that year, Zuckerberg said that ‘our philosophy is that we care about people first’.17 The worse these companies behave and the richer they become, the more they spend on looking cool and talking about fairness and community. This cannot be a coincidence. Wealthy corporations cultivate the popular ideas of the day not just by direct pressure, but also by funnelling money – through think tanks, TED Talks, grants, sponsorships and consulting – towards individuals and ideas that see the world as they do.18 And through their funding of think tanks and increasingly academia, the broad public imagination about technology is rebalanced in a subtle-but-definite way.19 But it’s much more than that. The iPhone and web browsers we now all use have carried the Californian Ideology around the world, infecting us all with the alluring idea that disruption is liberation, total individualism is empowerment and gadgets equal progress.

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

Additionally, saying “no” to anyone, let alone someone more senior, is really hard. At some point though, you’ll need to use that two-letter word if you want to set boundaries and avoid the drudgery of the perpetual “yes.” The Power to Say “No” Before we look at what to say, let’s look at how you feel. In one of the most popular TED talks ever, Amy Cuddy described her research about the effect of our body posture on our confidence. She had students “stand powerfully” for just two minutes, which increased their levels of testosterone by 10 percent (associated with confidence) and decreased their cortisol (the stress hormone) by 25 percent.

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Karau, “Group Decision Making: The Effects of Initial Preferences and Time Pressure,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25 (1999): 1342–54. 11. John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 12. David Allen, Getting Things Done (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 13. Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006). 14. Ron Gutman, “The Hidden Power of Smiling,” (TED talk, March 2011), http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_gutman_the_hidden_power_of_smiling.html. 15. Ernest L. Abel and Michael L. Kruger, “Smile Intensity in Photographs Predicts Longevity,” Psychological Science 21, no. 4 (2010): 542–44. Chapter 1: Stop Managing Your Time! ( . . . and Go Surfing) 1.

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Young, “Increasing Voting Behavior by Asking People If They Expect to Vote,” Journal of Applied Psychology 72, no. 2 (1987): 315–18. 4. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963): 371–8. 5. Amy Cuddy, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” (TED talk, June 2012), http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are. 6. William Ury, The Power of a Positive No (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 2007). Chapter 5: Stop Being So Productive! (Become More Strategic) 1. David Garlan, Daniel P. Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic, and Peter Steenkiste, “Toward Distraction-free Pervasive Computing,” Pervasive Computing 1, issue 2 (April–June 2002): 22–31. 2.

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

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

If they had their way, neurosurgeons would like to impact the brain at a single neuron level, but today’s deep brain stimulators are too big for this precision. Trying to target individual neurons with today’s implants is, as MIT professor of materials science and engineering Polina Anikeeva pointed out in her 2015 TED Talk, “akin to trying to play Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto with fingers the size of a pickup truck.” Making matters more complicated, these devices require surgery to install and, as the brain treats them like foreign invaders, serious medicine afterward. There’s also the issue of design. The body is a flexible 3-D environment, but most of today’s brain implants—be they deep brain stimulators or otherwise—are inflexible 2D devices that have more in common with traditional silicon chips than anything that exists naturally in the body.

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High Fidelity: “High Fidelity Raises $35m to Bring Virtual Reality to 1 Billion People,” High Fidelity, June 28, 2018. See: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/high-fidelity-raises-35m-to-bring-virtual-reality-to-1-billion-people-300673807.html. NeoSensory: “NeoSensory.” See: https://neosensory.com/?v=7516fd43adaa. See also: David Eagleman, “Can We Create New Senses for Humans?,” TED Talk, https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans. Dreamscape: “Dreamscape.” See: https://dreamscapeimmersive.com/. See also: Bryan Bishop, “Dreamscape Immersive Wants to Bring Location-Based VR to the Masses, Starting with a Shopping Mall,” Verge, January 15, 2019. See: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/15/18156854/dreamscape-immersive-virtual-reality-los-angeles-walter-parkes-bruce-vaughn.

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One Billion Android Teachers Per Year In 2012, Nicholas Negroponte: David Talbot, “Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves,” MIT Technology Review, October 29, 2012. See: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/. One Laptop per Child: See: http://one.laptop.org/. Negroponte told the MIT Review: Ibid. Sugata Mitra: Watch Sugata Mitra’s full “Kids Can Teach Themselves” TED Talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves?language=en. Ed McNierney, the nonprofit’s CTO, told the MIT Review: Ibid. Global Learning XPRIZE: See: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning. over a billion Android handsets manufactured each year: According to Gartner, over 1.5 billion smartphones were sold in 2017.

City 2.0: The Habitat of the Future and How to Get There by Ted Books

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, big-box store, carbon footprint, clean tech, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, demand response, food desert, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Induced demand, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, McMansion, megacity, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, Zipcar

., each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, each summer — TED includes the award-winning TED Talks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize. The annual TED Conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 1,000 TED Talks are available online, with more added each week. All are subtitled in English; many are subtitled in various other languages.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

This documentary illustrates all of these elements beautifully, using a principal who many assume is a creative genius (Seinfeld), but who really has to work his tail off. TEDTalks: TED talks are presentations from the annual TED Conference, established to share “ideas worth spreading.” There are two TED talks about creativity that I would highly recommend. The first is Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk, “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity.” Robinson, a long-time creativity researcher, educator, and author, encapsulates a number of the central insights from his book, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative in this twenty-minute talk, which is one of the most viewed TED talks, approaching 100 million views. http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html.

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, meta-analysis, presumed consent, rolodex, selection bias, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, WikiLeaks

And then we left and he sent me a text about wanting to fuck me and I stared at it wishing it felt like a victory. All the chemicals that go crazy gluing us to someone by loving them, when they’re reabsorbed or redistributed or go wherever they go it’s like being left beached by the sea. The previous state makes no sense. There is a brilliant woman called Helen Fisher and I’d really recommend watching her TED talk about love if you haven’t already. She’s also written about theories of serial pair bonding; she studied divorce rates from countries across the world and found that the median duration for marriage was seven years. ‘Seven-year itch is proved real by science,’ cried crappy newspaper journalists who are never pictured with wry Labradors.

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Laws that forbid sex and marrying while forcing us to attend school create space for us to be children before the graduated slide into adulthood and its expectations. But in other countries there are different expectations; childhood ends earlier. Children may work and get married before they hit their teens, just like in the olden days in the U of K. Here is my pretend TED talk about the first consent laws. Imagine I am wearing what you recognise as my sexiest beret and on the big screen behind me emoticons are flashing up to signify how I feel about some of the information. SARA walks on stage. She seems nervous and is holding a pointy stick. SARA Hi guys, thanks for coming, thanks to Sweden for arranging this.

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SARA From 1275 up until the nineteenth century, creating doubt that a rape victim was a virgin would be sufficient to avoid a prosecution – a defence technique that echoes on in the raking-through of modern victims’ sexual history as a way of discrediting their testimony. Sombre clapping. SARA tries to cheer everyone up a little bit by doing a cartwheel but the mood is still pretty serious. I have to stop the TED talk now because I can’t think of any more emoticons. I don’t get them on my phone – they come up as little empty boxes. The story of how the age of consent was raised to sixteen is pretty incredible. In 1885 there was an investigative journalist called William Stead and he went undercover to interview procuresses and the girls they bought and sold.

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, fake news, Firefox, gender pay gap, invention of movable type, Louis Daguerre, meta-analysis, Neil Kinnock, Ocado, phenotype, Russell Brand, TED Talk, telemarketer, twin studies, zero-sum game

Whenever a woman does break through she’s referred to as a ‘female murderer’, which she finds very patronising. Makes her want to work even harder at killing people, until she gets some respect. If you want to passionately argue that this male-on-male killing is created by culture then I will watch your TED talk, but I’m unlikely to be convinced. Throughout our evolution males have competed brutally with each other for resources and mates, and only the successful shared the genes for physical dominance with their sons and grandsons. This (mostly) historical violence remains crucially relevant to modern parenting.

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Dirty Daubings Waw chica waw waw, please come in and fix the washing machine. Tens of thousands of years ago Homo sapiens began making images of bodies. We don’t know how erotic early people found the images, whether these figures were nude to inspire lust or purely because no one had any clothes on. We don’t know the intentions of the artists because they didn’t do TED talks and Q&As explaining ‘this piece represents the death of my mother. Although she lives on in my mind. And in Chelmsford.’ What I’m trying to say is that olden-days artists weren’t pretentious arseholes, they just did their little pictures and died. We can’t know what was considered aesthetically arousing by these ancient people.

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I mean his type of death overshadows, that’s the word I should have used. Testosterone It gets referred to as ‘the male hormone’ but all bodies have it. In the female body it’s made in the ovaries (indoor testicles) and the adrenal glands. In male bodies it’s produced by the adrenal glands and the testes. *TED talk voice* It’s a 19-carbon steroid hormone made from cholesterol and it’s largely responsible for the creation of what we consider ‘male’ attributes. During adolescence testosterone production ramps up to endow the male body with heightened sex characteristics. These include a deeper voice, facial hair, increased body hair, pubic hair, broadening of shoulders and face, and maturation of penis and testicles, becoming ready for reproduction.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

‘How swarming will change warfare’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 74, no. 6 (2018): 385–389 and Verbruggen, Maaike, ‘The question of swarms control: challenges to ensuring human control over military swarms’, SIPRI Non Proliferation and Disarmament Papers, no. 65, December 2019, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019–12/eunpdc_no_65_031219.pdf. The Perdix swarm is on the US Navy’s YouTube channel, at https://youtu.be/bsKbGc9TUHc. 20. Kumar, Vijay. ‘Robots that fly and cooperate’, TED Talk, 1 March 2012, https://youtu.be/4ErEBkj_3PY. 21. Future of Life Institute, ‘Slaughterbots’, YouTube, 13 November 2017, https://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw. 22. Martin, David. ‘Russian hacking proves lethal after Ukranian military app hijacked’, CBS News, 22 December 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-hacking-proves-lethal-after-ukrainian-military-app-compromised/. 23.

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Twilley, Nicola. ‘Seeing with your tongue,’ The New York Times, 8 May 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/seeing-with-your-tongue. 26. Nagel, Thomas. ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ The Philosophical Review 83, no.4 (1974): 435–50. 27. David Eagleman, ‘Can we create new senses for humans’, TED talks, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare. 28. Pais-Vieira, Miguel, Mikhail Lebedev, Carolina Kunicki, Jing Wang, and Miguel A. L. Nicolelis. ‘A brain-to-brain interface for real-time sharing of sensorimotor information’, Scientific Reports 3 (2013): 1319.

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‘Neocortex size and group size in primates: a test of the hypothesis’, Journal of Human Evolution 28, no. 3 (1995): 287–296. Eady, Yarrow. ‘Tesla’s deep learning at scale: using billions of miles to train neural networks’, Towards Data Science, 7 May 2019, https://towardsdatascience.com/teslas-deep-learning-at-scale-7eed85b235d3. Eagleman, David. ‘Can we create new senses for humans’, TED talks, March 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare. Elgammal, Ahmed, Bingchen Liu, Mohamed Elhoseiny, and Marian Mazzone. ‘Can: Creative adversarial networks, generating “art” by learning about styles and deviating from style norms’, arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.07068 (2017).

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.60 Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes act cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face various forms of disadvantage in ways that are often invisible to others. The point of using the terminology of “intersectionalism,” as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that “where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.”61 Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself; it is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses.

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Of course, some individuals truly are racist, sexist, or homophobic, and some institutions are, too, even when the people who run them mean well, if they end up being less welcoming to members of some groups. We favor teaching students to recognize a variety of kinds of bigotry and bias as an essential step toward reducing them. Intersectionality can be taught skillfully, as Crenshaw does in her TED Talk.66 It can be used to promote compassion and reveal injustices not previously seen. Yet somehow, many college students today seem to be adopting a different version of intersectional thinking and are embracing the Untruth of Us Versus Them. Why Common-Enemy Identity Politics Is Bad for Students Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of intersectional thinking described above, along with training in spotting microaggressions.

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Parents can model the principle of charity by using it in family discussions and arguments. Practice the virtue of “intellectual humility.” Intellectual humility is the recognition that our reasoning is so flawed, so prone to bias, that we can rarely be certain that we are right. For kids in middle or high school, find the TED Talk titled “On Being Wrong.”24 The speaker, Kathryn Schulz, begins with the question “What does it feel like to be wrong?” She collects answers from the audience: “dreadful,” “thumbs down,” “embarrassing.” Then she notes that her audience has actually described what it feels like the moment they realize they are wrong.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

He would be the first to say that he isn’t 100 percent there yet, but he has reached a tipping point. He has realized that his education and mentoring as a leader had left him without the most important asset he needed to try to be successful—consciousness. Learn, Earn & Return During a recent TED talk, moral philosopher Peter Singer argued that the best way to change the world is to go into finance. You can make a lot of money and then give it away. If you make enough, you can pay the salaries of dozens of aid workers, which has a better social return on investment than simply becoming an aid worker yourself.

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As this happens, it disrupts almost every industry and creates economic opportunity for those who are able to either build new organizations or retrofit existing businesses to accommodate these changes. In this chapter, I cover five industry trends that illustrate how value is created in the Purpose Economy, and how it will continue in the future. 1. Retail In her now-famous TED talk, musician Amanda Palmer points out that “throughout history, musicians and artists have been parts of the community—the connectors and openers.”2 They played a special role in the community, because their livelihood required connecting with their audience and asking for help. This deep connection to the community created vulnerability.

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Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. New York: Free, 2011. Print. Stern, Lewis Richard. Executive Coaching: Building and Managing Your Professional Practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Print. “Silicon Valley Strategies.” Silicon Valley Strategies. N.p., n.d. Web. TED talk: Amanda Palmer Tennant, Kyle. Unfriend Yourself: Three Days to Detox, Discern, and Decide about Social Media. Chicago: Moody, 2012. Print. “The MBA—some history.” The Economist. N.p., 17 Oct. 2013. Web. Thomas, D. A. “The truth about mentoring minorities: Race matters.” Harvard Business Review. 2001.

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, fake news, Ford Model T, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kintsugi, Mason jar, post-truth, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, trade route, VTOL, white flight

He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”3 Inspired to try it for himself, Thwaites set about months of research in order to make a toaster entirely by hand, in a completely self-taught and self-sufficient manner. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the result is sad-looking and nonfunctional, more an abject sculpture than a real appliance. Yet the object provides poignant testimony about the limits of personal capability. In a TED talk that has been viewed by more than one million people, Thwaites explained that he had not really been interested in achieving self-sufficiency, but rather in tracing the process by which “rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world” turn into our finished consumer products.4 It is sobering to consider that a cheap toaster of the type he tried (and failed) to make would cost only about four British pounds to purchase at a store.

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Smith, “Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy,” in Smith, Amy Meyers, and Harold Cook, eds., Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), p. 20. I further discuss Smith’s work as a practicing historian in chapter 32. Chapter 18:  GOING DEEP   1   Sherry Turkle, “Connected, but Alone?” TED talk, February 2012. See also Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012).   2   Art Buchwald, “Art and Museum Fail to Maintain Worthy Attention,” Daily News (September 18, 1990), p. 4.   3   Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009), p. 22.

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Like Crusoe, who relied on the supplies from his wrecked ship, they almost always require externally produced resources. Rossi, “The Crusoe Condition: Making Within Limits and the Critical Possibilities of Fiction,” Journal of Modern Craft 10, no. 1 (March 2017).   4   Quotes from Thomas Thwaites are taken from “How I Built a Toaster—from Scratch,” TED talk, November 2010. Chapter 32:  A BOOK OF SECRETS   1   From an interview with Pamela Smith, November 23, 2016.   2   Pamela H. Smith, “Making as Knowing: Craft as Natural Philosophy,” in Smith, Amy Meyers, and Harold Cook, eds., Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), p. 19.   3   Pamela Smith, “Snakes, Lizards, and Manuscripts: Humanists in the Laboratory,” unpublished lecture, Columbia University, December 2, 2013.   4   Bernard Palissy, Admirable Discourses (1580).

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

“Young Firm Saves Babies’ Lives,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, June 7, 2011, www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgi-bin/2011/06/07/young-firm-saves-babies-lives/. 7. PLAY 1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, the Secret to Happiness, TED talk, February 2004, video, www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html. 2. Sir Ken Robinson, Bring on the Learning Revolution!, TED talk, February 2010, video, www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html. 3. Stuart Brown, Play Is More Than Just Fun, TED talk, May 2008, video, www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html. 4. Quoted in Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009), 29. 5.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

The wealthy technologists jumping on the humane technology bandwagon today may be less concerned about the impact of their platforms on people than the potential impact of those people on their own privilege and safety—especially if they figure out what has been going on all this time. As Peter Thiel’s philosophical guide René Girard would put it, the angry mob, whipped up into a mimetic frenzy, will eventually look for a scapegoat. If only there were a button one could push to make them go away. 9 Visions from Burning Man WE ARE AS GODS Y ou’re watching a TED Talk. It doesn’t matter which one. Really, with few exceptions, it doesn’t. There’s some guy standing in the trademark circular patch of red carpet, telling you that everything you know about the world is wrong. He used to think that way, too, until he had an epiphany that turned it all around. He had the ultimate counterintuitive insight, and realized it’s not this way at all, it’s that way.

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It obligates us to catalyze an evolutionary leap, to orchestrate the equivalent of a Big Bang in order to get the whole universe to conform to the exponential intentions of our species and its most influential investors. It’s a sensibility that—by virtue of its ubiquity in venture philanthropy—informs even less hubristic efforts at addressing hunger, inequality, and the environment, as if one needs a totalizing, end-to-end, universal solution capable of being summarized in a TED Talk in order to be considered worthy at all. It’s what we now, disparagingly, call technosolutionism. ReGen Villages, for example, is the brainchild of former game designer James Ehrlich, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford and a teacher of “disaster resilience” for Singularity University. ReGen is a total solution for the creation of regenerative and resilient communities that are capable of producing their own organic food, sourcing clean water, and educating their young, all with renewable energy and in a circular economy.

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Yes, nature is in trouble, but The Mindset’s approach to addressing this collective crisis is always to do something. Fix it. Hack it. Reboot it. Develop it. Scale it. Automate it. As if doing less, or even doing nothing, were not an option. Repairing what we have, scaling back, or even seeking incremental progress doesn’t make for an exciting podcast, online panel, or TED Talk. But neither does it require massive capital investment, sales speeches, or “buy-in.” ReGen Villages are themselves just one possible component of an even bigger initiative conceived by Ehrlich’s friend and supporter Jim Rutt. The former chairman of leading systems theory thinktank the Santa Fe Institute, Rutt has been working on his own reboot of the world from the bottom up, called Game B.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

This is the idea, promoted by the psychologist Angela Duckworth, that the ability to stick to a task you’re passionate about, and not give up even when life puts obstacles in your path, is key to life success, and far more important than innate talent. The appetite for her message was immense: at the time of this writing, her TED talk on the subject has received 25.5 million views (19.5m on the TED website and a further 6m on YouTube; Angela Lee Duckworth, ‘Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance’, presented at TED Talks Education, April 2013; https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duck-worth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance), and her subsequent book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, became a New York Times bestseller and continues to sell steadily.

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‘This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm … but I did not think it through.’14 But the damage had already been done: millions of people had been informed by a Nobel Laureate that they had ‘no choice’ but to believe in those studies. Priming isn’t the only psychological effect to have been given an audience in the millions. Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy rocketed to fame in 2012 with a TED talk advocating ‘power posing’. She recommended that just before you enter a stressful situation, such as an interview, you should find two minutes in a private place (such as a bathroom stall) to stand in an open, expansive posture: for example, with your legs apart and your hands on your hips. This powerful posture would give you a psychological – and hormonal – boost.

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An experiment by Cuddy and her colleagues in 2010 had found that, compared to those who were asked to sit with arms folded or slouched forward, people who were made to power-pose not only felt more powerful, but had higher risk tolerance in a betting game and had increased levels of testosterone and decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol.15 Cuddy’s message that people who used the two-minute power pose could ‘significantly change the outcomes of their life’ struck a chord: hers became the second-most-watched TED talk ever, with over 73.5 million views in total.16 It was followed in 2015 by Cuddy’s New York Times-bestselling self-help book, Presence, whose publisher informed us that it presented ‘enthralling science’ that could ‘liberate [us] from fear in high-pressure moments’.17 Provoking quite some degree of mockery, the UK’s Conservative Party seemed to take Cuddy’s message to heart, with a spate of photos appearing that same year of their politicians adopting the wide-legged stance at various conferences and speeches.18 Alas, also in 2015, when another team of scientists tried to replicate the power-posing effects, they found that while power-posers did report feeling more powerful, the study ‘failed to confirm an effect of power posing on testosterone, cortisol, and financial risk’.19 The critical spotlight that was activated in the replication crisis has also been aimed at older pieces of psychology research, with similarly worrying results.

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

classic study, epigenetics, fear of failure, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), TED Talk

., “Adverse Childhood Experiences, Dispositional Mindfulness, and Adult Health,” Preventive Medicine 67 (October 2014), 47–53. In Conclusion Indeed, it is “our misfortunes that drive”: These quotes emerge from writer Andrew Solomon’s TED Talk “How the Worst Moments in Our Lives Make Us Who We Are” (filmed March 2014) and were honed through email exchanges with Solomon. The TED talk can be found at http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_how_the_worst_moments_in_our_lives_make_us_who_we_are?language=en (accessed February 24, 2015). Researchers have found that in the last decades: Chioun Lee, “Childhood Abuse and Elevated Markers of Inflammation in Adulthood: Do the Effects Differ Across Life Course Stages?

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Not surprisingly, those who had experienced a lot: A. Keller, K. Litzelman, L. E. Wisk, et al., “Does the Perception that Stress Affects Health Matter? The Association with Health and Mortality,” Health Psychology 31, no. 5 (2012), 677–84. In fact, she points out, this latter group: Kelly McGonigal’s TED Talk on the upside of stress can be found here: Kelly McGonigal, PhD, “How to Make Stress Your Friend,” TEDGlobal 2013 (June 2013), http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend (accessed April 7, 2014). When something traumatic occurs, the hormone noradrenaline: E. S. Faber, A.

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Researcher John Gottman, MD, PhD: John Gottman, MD, PhD, talks about this 5-to-1 ratio of positive to negative interactions in this talk, available on YouTube: “The Magic Relationship Ratio,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw9SE315GtA (accessed February 25, 2015). Which means we “have to build stop signs”: Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, talks about “the gentle power” of gratefulness in this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_steindl_rast_want_to_be_happy_be_grateful (accessed August 19, 2014). Matthew Lieberman, PhD, professor of psychology: J. D. Creswell, B. M. Way, M. D. Lieberman, et al., “Neural Correlates of Dispositional Mindfulness During Affect Labeling,” Psychosomatic Medicine 69, no. 6 (July–August 2007), 560–65; L.

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

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

Similarly, public officials must trust that we can be counted on to help them protect public safety, so long as the rules protecting individual freedom are clear and followed consistently. But building and maintaining both kinds of trust—finding the balance between individual and public obligations—has always defined the progress of institutions. But it may be more art than science. In an engaging TED talk, the British conductor Charles Hazelwood describes the critical importance of trust in leading an orchestra. A conductor’s instrument, of course, is the orchestra itself, and so when he raises the wand, he has to trust that the musicians will respond, and the musicians have to trust that he will create a collective environment within which each can do his or her best work.

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“The Terrorism Fight Needs Silicon Valley; Tech Executives Are Dangerously Wrong in Resisting the Government’s Requests for Their Help.” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2016. Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-terrorism-fight-needs-silicon-valley-1467239710. Hazelwood, Charles. “Trusting the Ensemble.” TED Talk, 19:36, filmed July 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_hazlewood. Gates, Bill. “Memo from Bill Gates.” The Official Microsoft Blog, January 11, 2012. http://news.microsoft.com/2012/01/11/memo-from-bill-gates/#sm.00000196kro2y0ndaxxlau37xidty. Delgado, Rick. “A Timeline of Big Data Analytics.”

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See also specific products Tait, Richard, 7, 29 talent development, 117–18 TCI company, 28 teachers, 104, 106, 198, 226 teams and team building, 1, 39, 56, 107, 117–18 technology boom of 1990s, 24 democratizing and personalizing, 69 diffusion of, 216–17, 219 disruption and, 12 empathy and, 42–43 future of, 140–44 human performance augmented by, 142–43, 201 intensity of use, 217, 219, 221, 224–26 soul and, 68–69 transformation and, 11–12 TED talks, 180 telecommunications, 225 teleconferencing, shared-screen, 142 telegraph, 186 telepresence, 236 telerobotics, 236 tensor-processing unit (TPU), 161 Teper, Jeff, 29 terrorism, 172, 177–79 TextIt, 216 theoretical physicists, 162–64 think weeks, 64 32-bit operating systems, 29 Thiruvengadam, Arun, 187 Thompson, John, 14–15 3D printing, 228 three C s, 122–23, 141 Three Laws of Robotics, 202 ThyssenKrupp, 59–60 Tiger Server project, 30 time management model, 138 Tirupati, India, 19 topological quantum computing (TQC), 166 Toyota, 127 Tractica, 198 trade, 229–31, 236 training, 92, 227 transfer learning, 151, 153, 155 transformation, 11–12, 57, 67, 90 cloud and, 42, 55–56, 71 cultural (see culture, transforming) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 230–31 transparency, 135, 174–75, 191–92, 202, 204–6 Trump, Donald, 212, 230 trust, 56, 88, 107, 135, 169–94, 205, 236 Turing, Alan, 26 Turner, Kevin, 3 TV white space, 99, 225 Twilight Zone, The (TV show), 159 Twitter, 174 2001 (film), 201 two-in-one computers, 129 two-sided markets, 50 Uber, 44, 126, 153 uncertainty, 38, 111, 157 United Kingdom, 215, 236 United Nations, 44 U.S.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

For an informative and interesting summary of these ideas go to Dan’s Social Intelligence Talks at Google at https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=-hoo_​dIOP8k. 3. For more on Dan Gilbert’s ideas on “synthesizing happiness” watch his TED Talk, “The Surprising Science of Happiness,” http://​www.​ted.​com/​talks/​dan_​gilbert_​asks_why_​are_we_​happy and read Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006). 4. For more on Barry Schwartz’s ideas on choice and choosing watch his TED Talk, “The Paradox of Choice?,” https://​www.​ted.​com/​talks/​barry_​schwartz_on_​the_paradox_​of_choice?​language=en. Chapter 10 Failure Immunity 1. Angela Duckworth’s studies on grit and self-control are summarized in a great article: Daniel J.

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The notion that “people who can make an explicit connection between their work and something socially meaningful to them are more likely to find satisfaction, and are better able to adapt to the inevitable stresses and compromises that come with working in the world” is one of the important ideas in Seligman’s book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Books, 2012). Chapter 3 Wayfinding 1. For more information on the concept of flow, see Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). 2. See Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s TED Talk “What’s so special about the human brain?,” https://​www.​ted.​com/​talks/​suzana_​herculano_​houzel_​what_is_​so_special_​about_the_​human_brain; and Nikhil Swaminathan, “Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?,” Scientific American, April 29, 2008, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-the-brain-need-s/. 3.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Like the study in which people were offered 30 randomly selected chocolates and ended up being less satisfied and more regretful than when they were offered only six randomly selected chocolates.20 Or the discovery that the more retirement mutual funds employers offered to their employees through the investment firm Vanguard, the less and less those employees participated. This has been explained by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, in his 2006 TED talk: Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you’ll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don’t have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer.21 For appliances, is there anything simpler than buttons?

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Your own schedule. Your own style of working. And I wouldn’t have you any other way. You’re spécial. This reality, I’m sorry to say, isn’t what we typically embrace when we make most software today—despite the billion-dollar valuations, optimistic NASDAQ NDXT-like indices, and promises of grand TED talks shot from nine camera angles.3 We don’t make a separate digital interface for each and every unique person. Within the constraints of modern front-end software development, that would be an endless, gargantuan task. Sometimes, antithetically, graphical user interfaces are even despairingly based on a single person’s view of the world; in other words, not yours.

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To prevent that potential failure, many air bag systems now use several additional sensors—such as weight, seating position, and seat belt use—to determine whether the air bag should be deployed.1 I personally root for sensors and predictive systems to help solve failure in real time, such as those General Electric (GE) has mentioned in their move for an Industrial Internet. Marco Annunziata, chief economist at GE, explained in his TED talk: We’ve developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft. It’s self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss. The aircraft, while in flight, will communicate with technicians on the ground. By the time it lands, they will already know if anything needs to be serviced.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

With Helen Hester, he is finishing his next book After Work: The Fight for Free Time (2020). Daniel Susskind explores the impact of technology, particularly artificial intelligence, on work and society. He is a fellow in Economics at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he teaches and researches. He is the co-author of the best-selling book The Future of the Professions. His TED Talk, on the future of work, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. Previously Susskind worked in the British Government—as a policy adviser in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, as a policy analyst in the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street, and as a senior policy adviser in the Cabinet Office. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.

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Then I want to use these ideas—and their limitations—to set out a few implications for the future of work. This talk draws explicitly on other work I have done: for instance two books, The Future of the Professions (2015/2017) and A World Without Work (2020), other pieces of research, and a recent TED Talk, ‘3 Myths about the Future of Work (and Why They’re Not True)’. I want to begin with the strange changes that took place in labour markets from the 1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century. During that period, if you had lined up workers in many countries from lowest-­ skilled to highest-skilled, you would have found that low-skilled and high-skilled employment shares at either end of the line grew, but employment shares for those in the middle shrunk (by ‘employment shares’, I mean the share of these roles in overall employment).

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Susskind As noted at the outset, this talk draws explicitly on existing writing and research, including material that I developed with my co-author, Richard Susskind. For example, see the following references. References Susskind, D. (2017, November). 3 Myths about the Future of Work (and Why They’re Not True), A TED Talk Delivered in London, November 2017. Susskind, D. (2019). Re-thinking the Capabilities of Technology in Economics. Economics Bulletin, 39(1), A30. Susskind, D. (2020). A World Without Work. London: Allen Lane. Susskind, D., & Susskind, R. (2015/2017). The Future of the Professions. Oxford: OUP. Susskind, D., & Susskind, R. (2018).

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

What I learned from my work-from-home struggles was how to know myself, my boundaries and shortcomings, and it changed my life and my productivity: my work was better in quality and quantity, and so was my time off. So when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, and many people began working from home for the first time, I posted an Instagram story in which I shared a ‘work-from-home’ tip. I recommended that people who struggle to concentrate after lunch watch a TED Talk during their break and give it their full attention. For me, this distracts enough from my work to give me a much-needed break, without the risk of falling into a full-on YouTube hole which ends up with me being so engrossed in an instruction video on how to make an Ikea elfstödt into a loo roll holder that I miss my 3pm call.

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Envisioning what I wanted the book to add to people’s lives and how I wanted them to talk about it is what allowed me to position everything in my mind and know what I was working towards. I’ll let you be the judge of whether it’s worked or not! Change your scenery. If you have the option, walk to a local café or sit in the park – a change of scenery always helps. Sitting at your desk isn’t always the most inspiring place to be, especially if you’ve been there all day. Watch a TED Talk. Concentrate and take notes on it – what do you and don’t you agree with? Warm up your critical thinking and your creativity will follow. Lifestyle Creativity Triggers These are for implementing more widely as part of your general lifestyle. Of course, you won’t be able to implement them last minute to get into your flow or deep work, but they’re definitely worth bearing in mind to optimise the amount of time, space and capacity you have for creativity in your day.

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Becoming, Michelle Obama (2018) Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton (2018) How To Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned from Things Going Wrong, Elizabeth Day (2019) Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition, Cathy Park Hong (2020) More than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are, Elaine Welteroth (2019) Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood (2017) What I Know for Sure, Oprah Winfrey (2014) Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Maya Angelou (1993) Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person, Shonda Rhimes (2015) Podcasts Freakonomics Radio How I Built This How To Do Everything Power Hour Revisionist History TED Talks Daily The Debrief The Naked Scientists The Tim Ferriss Show Unlocking Us Where Should We Begin? You Are Not So Smart Online Resources Bitch Media Business Insider Bustle Dazed Digital Fast Company’s 30-Second MBA Forbes Magazine gal-dem Harvard Business Review Inc. Magazine Longform Longreads McKinsey New York Times TED-Ed The Cut ENDNOTES Introduction 1 ‘As I write …’, ‘UK unemployment rate continues to surge’, BBC News, 10 November 2020. 2 ‘In a 2016 …’, Bernard Salt, ‘Evils of the hipster café’, The Australian, 15 October 2016. 3 ‘In fact, the …’, ‘The avocado toast index: How many breakfasts to buy a house?’

For the Love of Autism: Stories of Love, Awareness and Acceptance on the Spectrum by Tamika Lechee Morales

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Hangouts, neurotypical, stem cell, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, TikTok

Navigating Autism: 9 Mindsets for Helping Kids on the Spectrum (co-authored with Debra Moore): a book with nine strength-focused strategies for anyone working with children and teens on the spectrum. Thinking in Pictures (My Life with Autism): Dr. Grandin’s autobiography, recommended for individuals experiencing anxiety. “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds, a TED Talk: www.​ted.​com​/talks​/temple_​grandin_​the_world_​needs_all​_kinds_of​_minds Website templegrandin.com Hashtag #SeeTheWholeChild My Love Letter to My Mother and My Mentors Dear Mother, Teachers, and Mentors, I want to thank my mother and all the teachers and mentors who helped me to live a full life and do lots of intellectually challenging work.

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In 2010, Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World and she also was featured in an HBO movie, Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes. Articles about Dr. Grandin have appeared in the New York Times, Discover Magazine, Forbes, and USA Today. She also has appeared on shows, such as Larry King Live, 20/20, 60 Minutes, Fox and Friends, and has given TED Talks. Her book, Animals in Translation, was a New York Times bestseller. Other popular books are: Thinking in Pictures, Emergence Labeled Autistic, Animals Make Us Human, The Way I See It, and The Autistic Brain. Dr. Temple has been inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Born and raised in Illinois, Kacie was never really sure where or how she fit in, mostly because she rarely does. Kacie is a rebel—she puts ketchup on her hotdog. She is contrary, loving murder shows and chick flicks equally. And she is known for pushing the limits—too far—at least three times, the number of times she’s run out of gas. Her favorite TED Talks is Andrew Solomon’s “Love No Matter What,” favorite philosopher is Sun Tzu, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is her hero. She is the founder of therapymom.co, a community for parents raising autistic kids. Kacie’s a contributor on The Mighty and Kveller and she serves as a pro-bono education advocate. Kacie also works at BreezoMeter as social media manager.

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

This charged mixture, along with bold leadership and new technology, could lead to a global renaissance for cities, which could grow not just bigger but better. According to Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute, cities are the sources of our problems but also can be the sources of our solutions. In order to achieve that goal, however, “we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities,” Geoffrey said at a Ted Talk in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2011.3 What would a scientific theory of cities look like? IBMers who study cities describe it as a large set of structures, patterns, and processes that provide a formal, quantitative approach to understanding the complex systems of cities of all sizes. In this way, people who are involved in running, planning, and building cities will be able to comprehend how the human and built systems interplay with one another.

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Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). 2. United Nations Department of Urban and Social Affairs, “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision,” executive summary, February 2008, http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007WUP_ExecSum_web.pdf. 3. Geoffrey West, TED Talk, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2011, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyCY6mjWOPc. 4. “Fighting Terrorism in New York City,” 60 Minutes, CBS television, September 25, 2011. 5. Paul Maglio, IBM Research, interview, July 6, 2012. 6. Arizona State University, “Study Maps Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Building, Street Level for U.S.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Under her direction, Facebook’s revenues multiplied nearly a hundred times between 2008, when Sandberg signed on, and 2016, when the company generated $10 billion in profit. She also immediately started counting the number of Facebook’s female engineers and started a speaker series for women at the company, inviting guests like Gloria Steinem—similar to the events she had organized at Google. In 2010, Sandberg gave a now-famous TED talk in which she called out the lack of women leaders in business and government and called on women in the workforce not to “lean back” prematurely in their careers. Two years later, the Atlantic published an article by the public policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in which she attacked Sandberg directly.

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Slaughter had quit a high-profile, demanding job in the State Department (under Hillary Clinton) because her family needed her. Maybe, I thought, I would have to quit my job too. That night, I went to bed and cried myself to sleep, even though crying is the worst thing you can do when you’re going to be on television the next day. In the morning, I re-watched Sandberg’s TED talk and her commencement addresses at Barnard College and Harvard Business School. I took notes. Then I mustered up the courage to email her. Though I’d reported on Sandberg’s work at Facebook, we had never met in person and she might have had no idea who I was, but for some reason I felt compelled to thank her for putting herself out there on this sadly controversial subject.

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Under her direction, Facebook’s revenues: Matt Rosoff, “Look at How Much Sheryl Sandberg Has Done for Facebook,” Business Insider, Mar. 23, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/sheryl-sandberg-8-years-at-facebook-2016-3. not to “lean back”: Sheryl Sandberg, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” TED talk, Dec. 21, 2010, video, 14:58, https://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders. “Although couched in terms”: Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Atlantic, July/Aug. 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020.

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

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

Imagine asking how she makes such perceptive medical diagnoses. She might be able to give you a few hints, but ultimately she would struggle to explain herself. As Polanyi himself put it, very often “we can know more than we can tell.” Economists called this constraint on automation “Polanyi’s Paradox.” 24.  This is the language I used in my TED talk entitled “Three Myths About the Future of Work (and Why They Are Wrong),” March 2018. See David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 4 (2003): 129–333. 25.  Autor, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.”

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., Loeb Classical Library 57 (London: Harvard University Press, 2006), lines 950–55 of “Theogony.” 44.  Daniel Dennett calls this “cosmic warehouse” the “design space.” See, for instance, Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back. 45.  This point was also made well by Sam Harris, the US neuroscientist, in his TED talk, “Can We Build AI Without Losing Control over It?,” 29 September 2016. 5. TASK ENCROACHMENT   1.  David Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 132, no. 4 (2017): 1593–1640.   2.  Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs: Key Findings,” Pew Research Center, 6 August 2014, available at http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ (accessed August 2018).   3.  

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Lecture to the Society of Business Economists, London, 9 September 2014. ________. “Labour’s Share.” Speech at the Trades Union Congress, London, 12 November 2015. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker, 2016. ________. Sapiens. London: Harvill Secker, 2011. Harris, Sam. “Can We Build AI Without Losing Control over It?” TED talk, 29 September 2016. Harrison, Mark. “Soviet Economic Growth Since 1928: The Alternative Statistics of G. I. Khanin.” Europe–Asia Studies 45, no. 1 (1993): 141–67. Hassabis, Demis. “Artificial Intelligence: Chess Match of the Century.” Nature 544 (2017): 413–14. Haugeland, John. Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea.

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

The ocean is the quintessential dark place, while space is the ultimate escape in movies and video games. Even when humans have to battle hostile aliens, outer space is still a mostly fun backdrop. The ocean, meanwhile, is more often featured as a sort of hellscape in horror movies and bleak documentaries about overfishing and pollution. At a TED Talk in 2008, Robert Ballard, the founder of the Ocean Exploration Trust and owner of Nautilus, homed in on these issues: “Why are we ignoring the oceans?” he asked. “Why are we looking up? Is it because it’s Heaven and Hell is down here? Is it a cultural issue? Why are people afraid of the ocean? Or do they assume the ocean is a dark, gloomy place that has nothing to offer?”

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This is the challenge that Cassie Bongiovanni faces today, more than a half century later, having to explain again and again that the ocean is not mapped, no matter what the maps might show. “This is a characterization of what [the seafloor] would look like if you could remove the water. It gives you the false impression that it’s a map,” said Robert Ballard, the founder of the Ocean Exploration Trust and the owner of E/V Nautilus, in his 2008 TED Talk, displaying the Tharp-Heezen world map. “It is not a map.”83 Maps occupy an authoritative position in society and hold a false allure. They trick us into thinking we know a place better than we do, particularly in remote territory. You can’t use the Tharp-Heezen maps to find a specific place on the seafloor, as you would an ordinary map.

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James Cameron Doesn’t,” New York Times, September 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/ocean-sea-challenger-exploration-james-cameron.html. 9.Taub, “Thirty-Six Thousand Feet Under the Sea.” 10.Young, Expedition Deep Ocean, xiv. 11.Kelsey Kennedy, “The Forgotten Documents of a 1918 Tsunami in Puerto Rico,” Atlas Obscura, July 5, 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/puerto-rico-earthquake-tsunami-lost-records. 12.Expedition Deep Ocean (Discovery Channel, 2021), https://www.discoveryplus.com/show/expedition-deep-ocean. 13.Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021), 4. 14.Robert Ballard, “The Astonishing Hidden World of the Deep Ocean,” transcript, TED Talk, Monterey, California, May 2008, https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_ballard_the_astonishing_hidden_world_of_the_deep_ocean/transcript. 15.“Prince of Monaco Here on His Yacht,” New York Times, September 11, 1913. 16.Robert Kunzig, Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science (New York: W.

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

I think it’s extraordinarily likely that my colleagues who say the multiverse concept is crazy are right. But I’m not willing to say the multiverse idea is wrong, because there is no basis for that statement. I understand the discomfort with the idea, but I nevertheless allow it as a real possibility. Because it is a real possibility.” Greene delivered a TED talk about the multiverse in 2012, a twenty-two-minute lecture translated into more than thirty languages and watched by 2.5 million people. It is, for all practical purposes, the best place to start if you want to learn what the multiverse would be like. Greene has his critics, but the concept is taken seriously by most people who understand it (including Tyson, who has said, “We have excellent theoretical and philosophical reasons to think we live in a multiverse”).

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Greene has his critics, but the concept is taken seriously by most people who understand it (including Tyson, who has said, “We have excellent theoretical and philosophical reasons to think we live in a multiverse”). He is the recognized expert on this subject. Yet he’s still incredulous about his own ideas, as illustrated by the following exchange: Q: What is your level of confidence that—in three hundred years—someone will reexamine your TED talk and do a close reading of the information, and conclude you were almost entirely correct? A: Tiny. Less than one percent. And you know, if I was really being careful, I wouldn’t have even given that percentage a specific number, because a number requires data. But take that as my loose response.

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-hedgehog analogy, 199–201 through monomyths, 74 personal interpretation of events, 203 and relationship to history, 202–3 “utility myth,” 218–19 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 114–16 subjective vs. objective, 94, 96–97, 148–51 Supreme Court, 210 symmetry, statistical, 26–27 Syro (album), 38n Talking Heads, 68 Tartt, Donna, 52 TED talk about the multiverse, 105–6 Teenage Fanclub, 92n teenage years, recognition of, 62n telephone usage, changes in, 15–16 television first Golden Age (1940s–1960), 172 second Golden Age (1990s–2010s), 172 ancient Egypt analogy, 162–63 as art form, 71, 165–66 as entertainment only (1970s–1980s), 172–73 filming and staging, 168 incomparability to radio, 160n “misunderstanding” plot (1970s), 167 natural dialogue, 166–67 realism, desire for, 163–65, 167–68 reality TV, 169–70 realness, achieving, 171–72 roman à clef programming, 170–71 sports viewing, 192–93, 251–52 viewing, changes in, 159–60 Teller, Miles, 188–89 Tenth of December (Saunders), 23 Terminator (film franchise), 227 “Testify” (music video), 197–98 time effect of, 44–45, 56–57, 70, 205–6, 233–35 and space, 113–14 Toland, Gregg, 244 “Tom Joad” (song), 230 transgender issues, 29–30 transgressive art, 79–80 Trial, The (Kafka), 36, 38 Truman Show, The (film), 126 truths, accepting, 238–39 Twitter, 86 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 99–103, 105, 108–12, 115–16, 125n, 224–25 Ultimate Warrior, 234 universe.

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

When the search party arrives they may well find your sun-bleached bones, whereas the monkey seems likely to be thriving, happy to be free of the taunts of school children on field trips. Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider a stranger, slightly less plausible variant of this experiment in his superb TED talk, ‘Bananas in heaven.’1 Imagine that your plane was filled with 1000 humans and 1000 monkeys, all of which survived and were forced to live on a remote island. Would the results be the same when the rescuers landed on the shore a year and a half later? Likely not. In the second scenario, the humans have the edge for a reason that sits at the heart of our ability to build both great societies and functioning capital markets: our ability to flexibly cooperate with one another.

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Notes 27 Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Understanding that Launched a New Era in Modern Psychology (Jossey-Bass, 2001). 28 Daniel Crosby, You’re Not That Great (Word Association Publishers, 2012). 29 Dan Gilbert, ‘The surprising science of happiness’ TED Talk (February 2004). 30 Ibid. 31 Lee Ross and Craig Anderson, ‘Shortcomings in the attribution process: On the origins and maintenance of erroneous social assessments,’ in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (eds.), Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 129–152. 32 2014 NTSB US Civil Aviation Acccident Statistics. 33 Gerd Gigerenzer, Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions (Penguin, 2015). 34 Justin Kruger and David Dunning, ‘Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77:6 (1999), pp. 1121–34.

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What they found was hardly surprising – participants overestimated the likelihood of positive events by 15% and underestimated the probability of negative events by 20%. Likewise, Heather Lench and Peter Ditto performed a study where participants were shown six positive and six negative life events as well as their accompanying probability in the general population. Respondents endorsed 4.75 of the 6 positive life events as probably impacting them. In her TED talk, Dr. Tali Sharot speaks to some of the ways in which overestimation can impact our reasoning. She relates that overconfidence makes it hard for us to learn from new information and suggests that we are prone to revise our beliefs only when it suits us. She shares that patients who assume that they have a 50% chance of cancer and are informed that their odds are lower, say 30%, revise their opinion to around 35% when asked for a second estimate.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

It was Modi who saw how alluring and transformative economic growth could be. * * * — Not too long before he died in February 2017, I discussed the issue of growth in poor countries with Hans Rosling, a Swedish academic. Rosling was that rarest of things, a pop-star statistician.16 A master of the TED talk—in which he used dynamic bubble charts to present data, which he pointed to with a rubber hand attached to the end of a long stick—Rosling was a self-described “edutainer.” Although he objected to the term, he was also an optimist.17 He believed that poor countries were gradually closing the gap on rich Western ones, a trend that was most discernible in basic health data such as infant mortality.

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Murad Ahmed, “Your Robot Doctor Will See You Now,” Financial Times, January 13, 2016: www.ft.com. 11. “Why the Japanese Economy Is Not Growing: Micro-barriers to Productivity Growth,” McKinsey Global Institute, July 2000. 12. This hilarious example is taken from Rory Sutherland, “Life Lessons from an Ad Man,” TED Talk, July 2009: www.ted.com. 13. From a telephone interview with the former head of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Steve Landefeld, or Mr. GDP as I like to call him, February 2017. 14. Adam Sherwin, “Welsh Town Moves Offshore to Avoid Tax on Local Business,” Independent, November 10, 2015. 15.

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Larry Summers told me in a telephone interview, March 2017, “I think the statistics are wrong because I don’t think they take nearly enough account of quality improvements of various kinds. We need to make adjustments for quality increases.” 26. Chrystia Freeland, “The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich,” TED Talk, 2013: www.ted.com. CHAPTER 7: ELEPHANTS AND RHUBARB 1. “Bright Lights, Big Cities, Measuring National and Subnational Economic Growth in Africa from Outer Space with an Application in Kenya and Rwanda,” Policy Research Working Paper WPS7461, World Bank Group, 2015. 2. Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers, Cornell University Press, 2013, pp. 17–20. 3.

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

They achieved their level of comfort after making (and witnessing) dozens of boring, mediocre, and nerve-wracking presentations, each time learning how to improve and building their confidence. When Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking and cofounder of the Quiet Revolution, was booked to do a TED talk to coincide with her book’s publication, she embarked on what she called her “Year of Speaking Dangerously.” She joined Toastmasters, hired coaches, and did extensive preparation. It doesn’t have to be something as big as a TED talk to call for similar measures. The first step is to normalize the activity by hanging around people who have what you want. There is certainly value in spending time with peers who are in the same stage as you (defining, searching, practicing).

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See also Facebook; LinkedIn; Twitter content on, 163 extrovert on, 164 hobbies on, 167 for networking, 20, 82, 86, 114 for other people, 86 overview of, 161–64 real life with, 165–68 research on, 99 risk on, 164 transparency on, 153, 164–65 tribe and, 155–58, 161–64 values and, 167 vulnerability on, 164 Solitude of introverts, 22–23 networking and, 76 Spielberg, Steven, 13 StartOut, 112 Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Sinek), 99, 113 Success business expansion with, 217–18 in collaboration, 209, 210 defined, 64 freedom as, 143–44 Janeczko on, 113 motivation and, 143 in public speaking, 177–78 in sales, 141–44 ways to set yourself up for, 229–40 Surface acting, 67 Sustainability choices for, 21 for introvert entrepreneur, 21, 236–39 tribe and, 155 Swenson, Paula, 105 Talbot, Betsy, 28–29, 54–55 Talking to extroverts, 11–12 to introverts, 10–11 small talk, 77 Team Introvert, 13 Technology, 158–61 TED talks, 178 Telephone discomfort with, 44 for networking, 83 Testimonials from networking, 84, 85 for public speaking, 180 thank-you note for, 85 Thank-you notes, 85 TheIntrovertEntrepreneur.com, 63, 138, 139 on collaboration, 193 leadership resources in, 220 Toastmasters, 178, 179 Transparency authenticity and, 68–69 with content, 131 of introvert entrepreneurs, 153, 164–65 on social media, 153, 164–65 in tribe, 156–57, 185 Trial and error, 74 Tribe.

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Cal Newport, call centre, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, fear of failure, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, meta-analysis, peak-end rule, school choice, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, TED Talk

“The Service Encounter: Diagnosing Favorable and Unfavorable Incidents,” Journal of Marketing 54: 71–84. Doug Dietz MRI Adventure series. Dietz MRI story from his TED talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jajduxPD6H4, plus Dan’s interview with Dietz in July 2016. The quote about taking 1 minute to get kids on the table, versus 10, came from the interview, as did the quote about Bobby and the cable car. The other quotes come from the TED Talk. Some descriptions drawn from documents shared by Dietz. The 80% statistic, and the drop in need for sedation at Children’s Hospital, is from http://www.jsonline.com/business/by-turning-medical-scans-into-adventures-ge-eases-childrens-fears-b99647870z1-366161191.html.

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He’d spent two years working on a new MRI machine, and in the fall of 2007, he had his first chance to see the machine installed in a hospital. He said he felt like a “proud Papa” going to see his baby. When he entered the MRI suite, he saw the new diagnostic imaging machine and “did a happy dance,” he said in a 2012 TED Talk. Dietz retreated to the hall to watch for the first patients. While he waited, he saw a couple and their young daughter coming down the hallway. The girl was crying. As they got closer to the room, the father leaned down to the girl and said, “We’ve talked about this. You can be brave.” As soon as the little girl entered the room, she froze, terrified.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

“Do you sometimes think we try to do too much at once?” I asked one of my mentors. “I used to do that,” he answered. “And then I started making sure there was space in my calendar, enough space to allow air in so that I could breathe.” I mentioned my concerns to another friend and she directed me to Carl Honoré’s TED talk on the Slow Movement. Honoré didn’t start the movement—his talk and book came years after the idea had sprung up in Italy and started to spread worldwide. But his thoughts on the subject were certainly compelling. The Slow Movement started out as a protest against fast food. You have probably seen pictures of the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

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Ninety-five percent of them are read within three minutes, and it takes about 90 seconds to get a response. Ninety seconds! That means we often stop what we’re doing—getting dressed, eating dinner, talking to someone in front of you—in order to respond to “How’s it going?” Psychologist Adam Alter noted in his popular TED Talk that the smartphone is “where your humanity lives. And right now, it’s in a very small box.” Tech is the cause of many disruptions in our lives. For one thing, it interferes with our sleep. Most of us sleep with our phones in our hands or right beside us, and a third of us admit to checking our phones at some point in the middle of the night.

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It’s time to reevaluate many of the principles and priorities that govern our lives. The self-made-man ideal is just one of them. Another is the pursuit of constant growth in the consumer economy. Constant growth is not possible, and yet our jobs, retirement funds, and national financial security require growth to be considered healthy. As Kate Raworth said in her 2018 TED Talk, “We have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, and what we need, especially in the richest countries, are economies that make us thrive whether or not they grow.” Globally, we are not merely addicted to growth in stock markets and profit margins and GDP. It’s not just about bigger salaries that bring bigger houses and cars, either.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

carbon footprint, glass ceiling, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Fry, TED Talk, you are the product

She apparently now worked for the BBC during their coverage of swimming events, had appeared on the TV show A Question of Sport, had written an autobiography called Sink or Swim, was an occasional assistant coach at British Swimming GB, and still swam for two hours every day. She gave a lot of money to charitable causes – namely to Marie Curie Cancer Care – and she had organised a fundraising charity swimathon around Brighton Pier for the Marine Conservation Society. Since retiring from professional sport, she had swum the Channel twice. There was a link to a TED talk she had given about the value of stamina in sport, and training, and life. It had over a million views. As she began to watch it, Nora felt as though she was watching someone else. This woman was confident, commanded the stage, had great posture, smiled naturally as she spoke, and managed to make the crowd smile and laugh and clap and nod their heads at all the right moments.

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Working at String Theory, although she was perfectly okay talking with customers, she rarely spoke up in staff meetings, even though there had never been more than five people in the room. Back at university, while Izzy always breezed through presentations Nora would worry about them for weeks in advance. Joe and Rory were staring at her with baffled expressions. The Nora she had seen in the TED talk was not this Nora, and she doubted she could ever become that person. Not without having done all that she had done. ‘Hello. My name is Nora Seed.’ She hadn’t meant it to be funny but the whole room laughed at this. There had clearly been no need to introduce herself. ‘Life is strange,’ she said.

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It took a second, given the fact that he was smartly dressed in a blue cotton shirt and with hair far shorter than it was in his Bedford life, for her to realise it was Ravi. This Ravi looked friendly, but she couldn’t shake the knowledge of the other Ravi, the one who had stormed out of the newsagent’s, sulking about not being able to afford a magazine and blaming her for it. ‘You see, I know that you were expecting my TED talk on the path to success. But the truth is that success is a delusion. It’s all a delusion. I mean, yes, there are things we can overcome. For instance, I am someone who gets stage fright and yet, here I am, on a stage. Look at me . . . on a stage! And someone told me recently, they told me that my problem isn’t actually stage fright.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

If a larger percentage of the infrastructure cost of introducing smart motorways had been put towards education and demonstration, with temporary limits instead framed as ‘recommended’ speeds, acceptance and compliance may have been far higher.2 In a later chapter we discuss this with respect to perceptions of safety too. Our argument is summed up by Rory’s opening to a Ted Talk entitled ‘Life lessons from an ad man’: A question was given to a bunch of engineers about fifteen years ago: How do we make the journey to Paris better? They came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend £6 billion building completely new tracks from London to the coast and knocking about forty minutes off the 3.5 hour journey time.

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The result: the jams return, but even larger than before. This goes beyond human choice. The effect was predicted computationally by German mathematician Dietrich Braess in 1968 for electrical circuits and biological systems. More is not always faster. 3 R. Sutherland. 2009. Life lessons from an ad man. TED Talk, July (www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_an_ad_man). 4 This is known as the ‘Triple Access System’ and is explained in G. Lyons and C. Davidson. 2016. Guidance for transport planning and policymaking in the face of an uncertain future. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 88, 104–116.

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Rory Sutherland is the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK and the co-founder of its Behavioural Science Practice. He is author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense, writes The Spectator’s Wiki Man column, presents several series for Radio 4, serves on the advisory board of the Evolution Institute, and is former president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. His TED talks have been viewed more than 7 million times. Figure attributions The image on the front cover – ‘Metro Map Brain’ – was designed by Gareth Abbit/Ogilvy and figures 12, 18, 24 and the middle panel of figure 4 are photographs by Pete Dyson. The photo of Pete Dyson is © Dolly Crew, 2018; that of Rory Sutherland is © George Gottlieb, 2016.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

So give a yak herder in rural Tibet some smooth connectivity and he’ll access the same memory menu you do, and instead of going to yaks.com, he’s probably going to kill time reading the really scary and bitter one-star hotel reviews on Tripadvisor.com—or maybe he’ll get caught in a cute puppy warp on YouTube or maybe he’ll make himself a worthier person by bingeing on TED talks but, to be honest, he’ll probably be checking out porn. So. Much. Porn. Hofmann continues, “We have to consider the impact of a technology, its time to market, and its process. Is the company pursuing too many near-term projects? Are we overestimating their impact? How much should you spend on internal research, as opposed to buying new technologies?

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How often have you considered taking an Internet-free holiday only to find yourself crumbling on day two, hunched over a keypad in an Internet café, quivering with the power of reconnecting like a junkie getting a fix? Once you’re addicted to connection, you’ll do whatever it takes stay connected. The woman across from me on the TGV is held rapt by a TED talk on her iPad. I can always tell when someone’s just upgraded to a better computer and is really starting to gorge on Internet culture, because they go on TED binges on YouTube. (“Did you see that woman with autism who designs cattle slaughter facilities? She has autism! And she designs cattle slaughter facilities!”)

The Minimalist Way by Erica Layne

cognitive load, Inbox Zero, late fees, Mason jar, retail therapy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, solopreneur, TED Talk

Over time, as you practice intentionality with your finances, you’ll start to feel the peace of mind that comes from not just living within your means but from putting your money toward the things you really value. 4. KEEP YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE This, I admit, is sometimes the point where my zeal for budgeting begins to die a slow, sad death … And I don’t think I’m alone in this. So often we read a chapter like this one (or watch an inspiring TED talk or have a great conversation with a friend who happens to be a budgeting boss), and we get all fired up about mastering our spending habits. So we create a budget and maybe even stick to it for a few months. But then life happens, and we lose the fire. My answer for this obstacle is accountability.

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Over time, the study has expanded to include the men’s wives and children, which number up to 2,000 collectively. Fascinatingly, this massive volume of research shows that what makes a satisfying life isn’t your job title, income level, career satisfaction, religious affiliation, the number of children you have, or any combination of the above. It’s the quality of your relationships. In his viral TED talk, Robert Waldinger, the fourth director of this multigenerational project, shared the three main lessons the study has revealed: 1.People who are socially connected live longer, healthier lives. 2.It’s not the number of relationships but the quality of those relationships that matters. 3.People who feel they have supportive friends and family stay mentally sharp longer than those who don’t.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

They don’t just think, they don’t just feel, they change, they transform. And my body language and my voice are essential to my style of teaching. So, I’ve got to confess, when I sit down to write words on a page, I feel like there’s a gag over my mouth and one hand tied behind my back! Heck, I found that I could reach more than ten million people through one TED Talk alone. So what made me change my mind? The financial crisis caused tremendous pain, but it also made us reevaluate what’s most important in our lives—things that have nothing to do with money. It was a time to get back to basics, to the values that have sustained us through troubled times before.

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Wouldn’t you bet anything that the one on the left is still longer? You know the answer, and yet your brain continues to deceive you. The one on the left still looks longer. Your eyes haven’t caught up with your brain. “Our intuition is fooling us in a repeatable, predictable, consistent way,” Ariely said at a memorable TED Talk. “And there is almost nothing we can do about it.” So if we make these mistakes with vision, which in theory we’re decent at, what’s the chance that we don’t make even more mistakes in areas we’re not as good at—financial decision making, for example? Whether or not we think we make good financial decisions, or poor ones, we assume we’re in control of the decisions we do make.

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Saving sounds like you’re giving something up, you’re losing something today. But you’re not. It’s giving yourself a gift today of peace of mind, of certainty, of the large fortune in your future. So how did Benartzi and Thaler get around these challenges? They came up with a simple system to make saving feel painless. It aligns with our natures. As Shlomo said in a TED Talk, “Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year—sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas, volunteering more in the community, exercising more, and doing all the right things on the planet.” Here’s how it works: you agree to automatically save a small amount of your salary—10%, 5%, or even as little as 3%.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

It actually worked, generating enough electricity to power four light bulbs and two radios in his family home. Soon there was a queue of people at the door wanting to charge up their mobile phones, and a string of journalists reporting his remarkable invention. It was five whole years later, when invited to Arusha in Tanzania to give a TED talk, that William got to use a computer for the first time. ‘I had never seen the Internet,’ he later recalled. ‘It was amazing … I Googled about windmills and found so much information.’98 Kamkwamba’s ingenuity is clearly exceptional, but there are already innovators and experimenters in every community who, with access to the Internet, the knowledge commons, and a makerspace, could copy, modify and invent technologies for tackling their own communities’ most pressing needs, from rainwater harvesting and passive solar housing to agricultural tools, medical equipment and, yes, wind turbines.

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Chancel, L. and Piketty, T. (2015) Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris. Paris: Paris School of Economics. 44. Institute of Mechanical Engineers (2013) Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not. London: Institute of Mechanical Engineers, https://www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/global-food-waste-not-want-not 45. Jackson, T. (2010) ‘An Economic Reality Check’. TED Talk, available at https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_jackson_s_economic_reality_check/transcript?language=en 46. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2012) Cities and Biodiversity Outlook, Montreal, available at: https://www.cbd.int/doc/health/cbo-action-policy-en.pdf, p. 19. 2. See the Big Picture 1.

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Presentation at MIT System Design and Management Conference, 21 October 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMNElsUDHXA 41. Sterman, J. D. (2010) ‘A Banquet of Consequences’. Presentation at MIT System Design and Management Conference, 21 October 2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMNElsUDHXA 42. Diamond, J. (2003) ‘Why Do Societies Collapse?’ TED Talk, February 2003, available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse?language=en 43. Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Penguin. 44. Meadows, D. et al. (1972) The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books, and Meadows, D. et al. (2005) Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

Widder, “Bioluminescence of Deep-Sea Coronate Medusae (Cnidaria: Scyphozoa),” Marine Biology 146 (2004): 39–51. We need a NASA for the sea: Edith Widder, “How We Found the Giant Squid,” TED Talk, February 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_how_we_found_the_giant_squid. Ocean Research & Conservation Association, or ORCA: http://www.teamorca.org/orca/index.cfm. “more than 90 percent”: Edith Widder, “The Weird, Wonderful World of Bioluminescence,” TED Talk, May 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_the_weird_and_wonderful_world_of_bioluminescence/transcript?language=en. 8. Day-glo Jellies “pulmone marino si confricetur lignum”: The translation of the sentence is “If wood is thoroughly rubbed with Pulmo marinus, it seems to be on fire, so much so that a walking-stick, so treated, throws a light forward.”

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She poured all of her award money into the foundation, but it’s not enough. In 2013, funding for space exploration outpaced funding for the ocean exploration 150 to 1. Only three people have descended to the Marianas Trench, but more than five hundred have gone to space, and twelve have stepped on the moon. We need a NASA for the sea, Edie concluded at the end of a TED talk describing her search for the giant squid. Further, she has said, “more than 90 percent, 99 percent, of the living space on our planet is ocean. It’s a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows, bizarre and wondrous creatures, alien life-forms that you don’t have to travel to another planet to see.”

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See also Strobilation Strobilation, 56–57, 64, 129 Stylophora, 271 Submersibles, 13, 69, 99, 102–3, 105, 107, 168 Suez Canal, 31, 244–47, 284, 286–87 Sunfish, 171 Superstorm Sandy, 237–39 Sweden, 24 Swordfish, 171, 201 Synapses, 139–40 Syria, 30 Systema Naturæ (Linnaeus), 190 Taiwan, 46 Takahashi, Kazutoshi, 155 TED talk (Widder), 107 Tel Aviv, 4–5, 258, 276, 281, 283, 288 Tel Aviv University, 278–79, 283 Tethys (sea goddess), 56 Texas, 25, 44, 183, 210, 284–85. See also specific cities Texas, University of at Austin, 222, 233 at Dallas, 90 Texas A&M University at Galveston, 154 Thailand, 228 Tiberias (Israel), 258, 263, 265 Tiburonia granrojo (big red jellyfish), 99–100 Titov, Gherman, 128–29 Tokyo, 79, 225, 236 Tokyo Bay, 191 Toxins, jellyfish, 11, 234, 245, 253 biochemistry of, 250–51, 255–56, 258 deadliest, 26, 58, 248–50 stinging cell mechanism for deployment of, 258–60, 263 Tripedalia, 124 Tsien, Roger, 117–19 Tsushima Island (Japan), 202, 207–14, 235, 236, 238, 297 Tuna, 159–60, 174, 225, 226 bluefin, 171, 201 Turkey, 76, 245, 300 Turritopsis, 152–57 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 106, 109–10 Tyrannosaurus rex, 67 United Kingdom, 64 United Nations, 246, 286 Food and Agricultural Organization, 147, 198, 228 United States, 10, 34, 36, 64, 100, 111, 175, 228 atomic bombing of Japan by, 110 carbon emissions in, 284–85 desalination plants in, 25 endangered animals in, 172 jellyfish cuisine in, 48–49, 51–52 jellyfisheries in, 228 marine protected areas of, 199 ports accommodating supersize ships, 31 public aquaria in, 60 research on medical uses of jellyfish in, 50 in sting protocol collaborative network, 253 television commercials in, 114 See also specific cities, states, and regions Uruguay, 73 USS Ronald Reagan, 24–25 Uye, Shin-ichi, 184, 186–89, 193, 201–2, 210, 216–25, 227–35, 299, 302 Venomous and Poisonous Marine Animals (Williamson), 44 Venus girdle, 98 Verne, Jules, 106, 109–10 Vervoort, Wim, 74 Vesuvius, 109 Vienna, University of, 73 Vietnam, 228, 299 Villanueva, Alex, 88–91 Vineyard Sound, 86, 87 Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 88 Vogel, Steven, 85 Waikiki Beach (Hawaii), 25, 250 Wales, 300 Watson, Glen, 261–63 Whales, 24, 89, 92, 106, 161, 168, 170, 229 Widder, Edith (Edie), 102–3, 105–7 Widmer, Chad, 60 Wijnhoff, Gerarda, 73, 75 Woods Hole (Massachusetts), 84–94, 96, 97, 111 Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), 84, 94, 111, 177 Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), 84 World Open Water Swimming Association, 252 World War II, 73–75, 110, 160 Yamanaka, Shinya, 155, 156 Yanagawa (Japan), 216, 225–27, 229, 235 Yanagihara, Angel, 248–51, 253–55, 299 Yellow Sea, 187, 229, 234 Zappa, Frank, 156–57, 162 Zebrafish, 117 Zombie worms, 168 Zooplankton, 28, 30, 33, 76, 168, 261–62, 296 About the Author Juli Berwald received her Ph.D. in ocean science from the University of Southern California.

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

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

Chapter 1: Connected, Dependent, and Vulnerable 1 All or most of the information: Mat Honan, “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking,” Wired, July 6, 2012; Mat Honan, “Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore,” Wired, Nov. 15, 2012. 2 Over the past hundred years: Peter Diamandis, “Abundance Is Our Future,” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 3 And the mobile phone is singularly credited: Deloitte Consulting, Sub-Saharan Africa Mobile Observatory 2012, Feb. 4, 2014. 4 For centuries, the Westphalian system: Marc Goodman, “The Power of Moore’s Law in a World of Geotechnology,” National Interest, Jan./Feb. 2013. 5 Levin, a computer programmer: Amy Harmon, “Hacking Theft of $10 Million from Citibank Revealed,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1995. 6 One of the very first computer: Jason Kersten, “Going Viral: How Two Pakistani Brothers Created the First PC Virus,” Mental Floss, Nov. 2013. 7 Eventually, Brain had traveled the globe: For a fascinating and entertaining perspective on Amjad and Basit Farooq, and the history of computer malware, see Mikko Hypponen, “Fighting Viruses and Defending the Net,” TED Talk, July 2011. 8 Researchers at Palo Alto Networks: Byron Acohido, “Malware Now Spreads Mostly Through Tainted Websites,” USA Today, May 4, 2013. 9 Many large companies: Brian Fung, “911 for the Texting Generation Is Here,” Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014. 10 In 2010, the German research institute: Nicole Perlroth, “Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2012. 11 In the summer of 2013: Kaspersky Lab, Global Corporate IT Security Risks: 2013, May 2013. 12 A survey of its members: “Online Exposure,” Consumer Reports, June 2011. 13 According to a study by the Gartner group: “Gartner Says Worldwide Security Software Market Grew 7.9 Percent in 2012,” Gartner Newsroom, May 30, 2013; Steve Johnson, “Cybersecurity Business Booming in Silicon Valley,” San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 13, 2013. 14 The results: the initial threat-detection rate: Imperva, Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trend Report #14, Dec. 2012. 15 Though millions around the world: Tom Simonite, “The Antivirus Era Is Over,” MIT Technology Review, June 11, 2012. 16 The landmark survey: Verizon, 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report. 17 A similar study by Trustwave Holdings: Trustwave, Trustwave 2013 Global Security Report. 18 When businesses do eventually notice: Verizon RISK Team, 2012 Data Breach Investigation Report, 3. 19 From the time an attacker: Ibid., 51. 20 In that case, hackers: Mark Jewell, “T.J.

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/Feb. 2013. 5 Levin, a computer programmer: Amy Harmon, “Hacking Theft of $10 Million from Citibank Revealed,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1995. 6 One of the very first computer: Jason Kersten, “Going Viral: How Two Pakistani Brothers Created the First PC Virus,” Mental Floss, Nov. 2013. 7 Eventually, Brain had traveled the globe: For a fascinating and entertaining perspective on Amjad and Basit Farooq, and the history of computer malware, see Mikko Hypponen, “Fighting Viruses and Defending the Net,” TED Talk, July 2011. 8 Researchers at Palo Alto Networks: Byron Acohido, “Malware Now Spreads Mostly Through Tainted Websites,” USA Today, May 4, 2013. 9 Many large companies: Brian Fung, “911 for the Texting Generation Is Here,” Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2014. 10 In 2010, the German research institute: Nicole Perlroth, “Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt,” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2012. 11 In the summer of 2013: Kaspersky Lab, Global Corporate IT Security Risks: 2013, May 2013. 12 A survey of its members: “Online Exposure,” Consumer Reports, June 2011. 13 According to a study by the Gartner group: “Gartner Says Worldwide Security Software Market Grew 7.9 Percent in 2012,” Gartner Newsroom, May 30, 2013; Steve Johnson, “Cybersecurity Business Booming in Silicon Valley,” San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 13, 2013. 14 The results: the initial threat-detection rate: Imperva, Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trend Report #14, Dec. 2012. 15 Though millions around the world: Tom Simonite, “The Antivirus Era Is Over,” MIT Technology Review, June 11, 2012. 16 The landmark survey: Verizon, 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report. 17 A similar study by Trustwave Holdings: Trustwave, Trustwave 2013 Global Security Report. 18 When businesses do eventually notice: Verizon RISK Team, 2012 Data Breach Investigation Report, 3. 19 From the time an attacker: Ibid., 51. 20 In that case, hackers: Mark Jewell, “T.J.

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Chapter 3: Moore’s Outlaws 1 According to the International Telecommunication Union: Miniwatts Marketing Group, “Internet Users in the World,” Internet World Stats, Dec. 31, 2013, http://​www.​internetworldstats.​com/. 2 Though it took nearly forty years: Miniwatts Marketing Group, “Internet Growth Statistics,” Internet World Stats, Feb. 6, 2013, http://​www.​internetworldstats.​com/. 3 The greatest growth: Miniwatts Marketing Group, “Internet Users in the World, Distribution by World Regions,” Internet World Stats, Feb. 5, 2014, http://​www.​internetworldstats.​com/. 4 And while half the world: Doug Gross, “Google Boss: Entire World Will Be Online by 2020,” CNN, April 15, 2013. 5 The concept was named: Marc Goodman and Parag Khanna, “Power of Moore’s Law in a World of Geotechnology,” National Interest, Jan./Feb. 2013. 6 Incredibly, it literally: Cliff Saran, “Apollo 11: The Computers That Put Man on the Moon,” Computer Weekly, July 13, 2009. 7 The modern smart phone: Peter Diamandis, “Abundance Is Our Future.” TED Talk, Feb. 2012. 8 As a result of mathematical repercussions: Ray Kurzweil, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 7, 2001. 9 “law of accelerating returns”: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006). 10 Early criminal entrepreneurs: Evan Andrews, “6 Daring Train Robberies,” History.​com, Oct. 21, 2013. 11 Their carefully planned heist: Brett Leppard, “The Great Train Robbery: How It Happened,” Mirror, Feb. 28, 2013. 12 The incident kept the PlayStation: Keith Stuart and Charles Arthur, “PlayStation Network Hack: Why It Took Sony Seven Days to Tell the World,” Guardian, Feb. 5, 2014; “Credit Card Alert as Hackers Target 77 Million PlayStation Users,” Mail Online, Feb. 5, 2014. 13 In the end, financial analysts: J.

Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business climate, fail fast, hockey-stick growth, invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, transaction costs, web application, Y Combinator

Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Seattle: Pear Press, 2008). J. Rasmusson, The Agile Samurai: How Agile Masters Deliver Great Software (Raleigh, NC: Pragmatic Programmers, LLC., 2010). Blogs and Other Media “10 Inspiring TED Talks for Startups” http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/07/ten-inspiring-ted-talks-for-st.php Jeff Bussgang, “Seeing Both Sides” http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2009/11/what-makes-bostons-startup-scene-special.html Tom Chapman, “Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Lessons from Omaha” http://www.scribd.com/doc/60113134/Building-an-Entrepreneurial-Ecosystem-Lessons-from-Omaha Brad Feld, “Feld Thoughts” http://www.feld.com/wp/ William Fisher, “View from the Fishbowl: Noodling” (Silicon Prairie News) http://www.siliconprairienews.com/2011/06/view-from-the-fishbowl-noodling Daniel Isenberg, “How to Start an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem” (HBR blog network) http://hbr.org/product/how-to-start-an-entrepreneurial-revolution/an/R1006A-HCB-ENG Eric Koester, “Zaarly on Capitol Hill: Why the Startup Ecosystem Matters” http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/05/13/zaarly-on-capitol-hill-why-the-startup-ecosystem-matters/ Sarah Lacy, “Predictably Rabid: The Life and Times of Sarah Lacy” http://www.sarahlacy.com/sarahlacy/2008/07/the-post-gets-m.html 37signals, “The Slicehost Story” http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story Index Acquisitions Action-based networking Advertising and company name context online Agile business model Altringer, Beth Andrzejewski, Alexa Angel investors Angulo, Dave Animotion Bar Camps Barriers to attending Startup Weekend between entrepreneurs Bashaw, Nathan BelongingsFinder.org Benson, Jim Best practices Big Kitty Labs Blank, Steven Blogs and communication Memolane reference list sharing successes on venture capital firms Bootstrapping Braindump Brainstorming.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Patrick was also the first black governor of Massachusetts and, in some ways, an ideal Democrat for the era of Barack Obama—who, as it happens, is one of his closest political allies.21 “Our government is incredibly enlightened,” said John Harthorne, the head of the MassChallenge startup incubator, in a 2010 TED talk in which he explained why he chose Massachusetts for his planned entrepreneurial utopia. “I would wager a bet that Deval Patrick could go head-to-head on an intelligence test with any other governor.”22 Patrick’s oft-told life story follows the classic Democratic trajectory. A young man with loads of intelligence but no money, Patrick was lifted from nowheresville by an academic scholarship to a fancy prep school.

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I learned about this from one of the only sarcastic stories about innovation that I have been able to find, Eric Levenson’s “Deval Patrick Joins MIT to Innovate Their Innovation Initiative,” a post on Boston.com dated January 13, 2015. 21. Obama even drew certain of his famous 2008 campaign themes from Patrick’s 2006 run for the Massachusetts governorship. On the connection between the two men, see Gwen Ifill’s book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (Doubleday, 2009). 22. Watch Harthorne’s TED talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hisa30dJfP4. 23. For a concise summary of the life and times of Ameriquest, see the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, pp. 12–14: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf. For a lengthier version, see Michael W. Hudson, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis (Holt, 2010). 24. 

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See also financial crisis of 2008–9; and specific indexes Crash of 1929 stock options student loans subprime mortgages Summers, Larry surveillance Suskind, Ron symbolic analysts Syria TaskRabbit Tate & Lyle lockout Tawney, R. H. taxes Bill Clinton and capital-gains Carter and Cuomo and marginal rate Massachusetts and Obama and Social Security and taxi drivers teachers Teach for America Teamsters Union Tea Party technocracy Technocracy and The Politics of Expertise (Fischer) Techtopus scandal TED talks Teixeira, Ruy telecommunications Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Ten Percent Third World Time To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Treasury Department Truman, Harry Trump, Donald Truth in Sentencing Tsongas, Paul Twilight of the Elites (Hayes) Twitter Uber unemployment UNICEF innovation team United Auto Workers (UAW) United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights U.S.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power by Rose Hackman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, cognitive load, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Graeber, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, game design, glass ceiling, immigration reform, invisible hand, job automation, lockdown, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, performance metric, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Her mother was among the first generation of women who entered previously male-dominated white-collar industries en masse in the second half of the twentieth century.22 The figure of a corporate woman was normal to her, and she had good reason to believe her qualifications combined with her natural intelligence, charm, and assertiveness would all work in her favor as she sought to get ahead. Only a few years prior, in 2010, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, delivered a viral TED Talk titled “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders” that was followed by a 2013 bestselling book, Lean In.23 Her insight promised younger women like Devin the tools to not just enter former male-dominated industries but do what few women of older generations had managed once they were there: climb up the corporate ladder and thrive.

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In two landmark studies, Harvard researchers followed hundreds of privileged and non-privileged boys and men from their teen years to the end of their lives and found a strong association between connected, high-quality, positive relationships and life longevity for men. “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest at age eighty,” Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and one of the leaders of the research, said in a TED Talk on the subject.26 Good relationships were shown to protect not only men’s physical health but their mental and emotional health too. “How happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” Waldinger said in an interview with The Harvard Gazette titled “Good Genes Are Nice, but Joy Is Better.”27 Treating men as entirely rational and never emotional cuts them off from positive, connected relationships and time spent alive on Earth.

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Abele, “The Dynamics of Masculine-Agentic and Feminine-Communal Traits: Findings from a Prospective Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 4 (November 1, 2003): 768–76, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.4.768; Paula England, “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled,” Gender & Society 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 149–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243210361475. 25.  Heilman, Barker, and Harrison, The Man Box. 26.  Robert Waldinger, “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness,” TED Talk, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkKuTCFvzI. 27.  Liz Mineo, “Good Genes Are Nice, but Joy Is Better: Harvard Study, Almost 80 Years Old, Has Proved That Embracing Community Helps Us Live Longer, and Be Happier,” The Harvard Gazette, April 11, 2017, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/. 28.  

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

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

Within a month of its publication, Elon Musk was declaring that “with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon” and that AI “could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.”29 A year later, Musk would co-found OpenAI and give it the specific mission of building “friendly” artificial intelligence. Among those most deeply influenced by Bostrom’s arguments, the idea that AI will someday pose an existential threat began to be perceived as a near certainly—and a danger ultimately far more terrifying and consequential than more mundane concerns like climate change or global pandemics. In a Ted Talk with more than five million views, the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris argues that “it’s very difficult to see how [the gains we make in artificial intelligence] won’t destroy us or inspire us to destroy ourselves” and suggests that “we need something like a Manhattan Project” focused on avoiding that outcome by figuring out how to build friendly, controllable AI.30 None of this will be a concern, of course, until we manage to build a true thinking machine with cognitive capability at least equivalent to our own.

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Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon,’” Washington Post, October 24, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon/. 30. Sam Harris, “Can we build AI without losing control over it? (video),” TED Talk, June 2016, www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_can_we_build_ai_without_losing_control_over_it?language=en. 31. Irving John Good, “Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine,” Advanced in Computers, volume 6, pp. 31–88 (1965), vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/89424/TechReport05-3.pdf. 32.

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XIAOXIAO ZHAO MARTIN FORD is a futurist and the author of the New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots, which won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award; Architects of Intelligence; and The Lights in the Tunnel. He is also the founder of a Silicon Valley–based software development firm. His TED Talk on the impact of artificial intelligence on society has been viewed over 3 million times, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. Ford is a sought-after speaker and a leading expert on artificial intelligence.

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

Will Glenn Beck’s followers gain fewer information calories when they consume him on television rather than online? Ideas are not like vegetables. Anyone who’s ever eaten cucumbers can reasonably expect that eating another cucumber won’t be a health menace; there’s no need to taste a second cucumber to reach this conclusion. The fact that an idea is wrapped inside a TED talk—presumably, Johnson would put TED talks under nutritious, low-calorie sources—doesn’t make it a good idea; one cannot assess its nutritional value before one has heard the talk (or read the transcript) and situated this idea in the broader intellectual context consisting of many other ideas. Approximating the calorie count of information based on where it comes from might preclude important, contrarian ideas—from small or fringe sources—from entering the public debate as forcefully as they deserve.

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Remove that notion, along with its simplistic assumptions about the inherent benefits of openness or publicness, and the pundits are suddenly forced to confront complex empirical matters, to inquire into the politics of algorithms, to grapple with the history of facial-recognition technologies, to understand how techniques like “deep packet inspection” actually work. As long as Internet-centrism rules supreme, our technological debate will remain lazy, shallow, and unproductive: “the Internet,” no matter how many TED talks and Kindle singles are dedicated to it, will not tell us whether we need regular public audits of search engine giants like Google. Of course, pundits might say that such audits are “a war on Internet openness”—but this is precisely the kind of discourse we ought to avoid, as it makes claims about what appears to be a mythical entity.

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Rate My Professors offers four criteria: helpfulness, clarity, easiness, and hotness. The last is there mostly for humorous reasons, but what about others? Why should “easiness” be of concern in evaluating how we learn? The world out there is a complex place, and those who want “easiness” can always gorge themselves on TED talks. But even “clarity” has attracted the ire of many critics, primarily for creating the wrong impression that all complex ideas can and should be crammed into PowerPoint presentations. As writer Matthew Crawford points out, “Certainly clarity is desirable in a lecture, and the absence of it is often nothing but the professor’s own confusion or his failure to extricate himself from the tertiary quarrels and jargon of his discipline.

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

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

The complete list of twenty-first-century skills includes: creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, communication and collaboration information literacy, media literacy, information and communication technology literacy, and life and career skills. For more info, check out its website, http://www.p21.org. viii “Flow naturally catapults you to a level you’re not naturally in”: Ned Hallowell, AI, December 2012. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (HarperPerennial, 1990), pp. 4–5; or see his TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html. Researchers now believe flow: The full list of what people believe flow can accomplish could go on for days. For a good short summary, see: “The Art of Work,” Fast Company, August 2005, or http://www.fastcompany.com/53713/art-work.

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v=osgP5L_-v7U. 16 “That’s part of the problem with trying to discuss…”: Travis Pastrana, AI, June 2012. “I’ve been shooting action sports for twenty years”: Mike Blabac, AI, June 2012. 17 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Csikszentmihalyi’s history can be found in a number of places. See his TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html, or “Interview: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,” Omni, 17(4), p. 73. Also see “The man who found the flow,” Shambhala Sun, September 1998. 19 “During a peak experience”: Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 164.

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Georg Winterer and Daniel Weinberger, “Genes, Dopamine and Cortical Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Schizophrenia,” Trends in Neuroscience, Vol. 27, No. 11, November 2004. And: Sven Kroener, L. Judson Chandler, Paul Phillips, and Jeremy Seamans, “Dopamine Modulates Persistent Synaptic Activity and Enhances the Signal-to-Noise Ratio in the Prefrontal Cortex,” PLoS One, August 2009, 4(8):e6507. Also, Michael Sherman gave an excellent TED talk on how too much dopamine/pattern recognition leads to strange beliefs, see: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things.html. it’s why learning happens: P. R. Montague, P. Dayan, and T. J. Sejnowski, “A Framework for Mesencephalic Dopamine Systems Based on Predictive Hebbian Learning,” Journal of Neuroscience 16(5): 1936–47; P.

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

At that time, I had yet to fully develop the arguments around the simulation hypothesis, which are the focus of this book, but the model of living inside a simulation, where our thoughts and actions are (1) monitored, and (2) fed back into a loop that creates seemingly external events based upon our game state and our specific set of quests and achievements, fits very well into Jung’s idea of synchronicity. Jacques Vallee, in his TED Talk titled “The Physics of Everything Else” in 2011, was more explicit: he said that synchronicity and coincidence may reveal part of the underlying structure of how the universe stores information. He uses the analogy of a physical library—where we store and retrieve books according to physical dimension (book x, shelf y, slot 7).

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NPCs (conscious beings or unconscious simulations), 285–86 PEAR (Princeton’s Advanced Engineering Research Lab), 76 Penfield, Wilder, 75, 79 Penny Dreadful, 4 Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, 232 Perry, Paul, 229–230 philosophical questions of QI, 140–41 photoelectric effect, 126–27, 167 photorealism and VR rendering, 61 Photorealistic Mixed Reality (MR), 63, 66 photorealistic real-time VR, 65 phowa (the transference of consciousness), 197 Physical Matter Reality (PMR), 157, 173–74 “physical reality” vs. “simulated reality,” 75 physical world, creation of, 219–221 physics, new, 126–27 physics, old (classical), 124–26 physics engines, 16–17, 36–37, 123, 162, 176–78, 235, 283–84 physics engines vs. rendering engines, 51 “The Physics of Everything Else” (Vallée, TED talk, 2011), 240–41 picture element (pixel), 163 pixelated reality, 161 pixels 3D pixels and particles, 164–65 and 3D rendering engines, 59 characteristics of, 255 created by rendering engine, 51 definition of, 10 games rendered using, 2D to 3D, 42–44 information rendered as, 53 and particles, 162–64 physics engines vs. rendering engine, 51 and quanta, 167–69 rendered pixels, 135 value of, 162–64, 181, 262 and video game languages, 33 and virtual space (pixelated world), 181–82 pixels, experiments for evidence, 255–266 Planck, Max, 167–68, 290 Planck constant, 168, 267 Planck length, 168–69, 175, 181–82 Planck time, 181–82 Planetfall, 29 Plato, 201, 270–71 Play Labs, 6 player characters (PCs), 82, 280–81 player game state, 30 PMR (Physical Matter Reality), 157, 173–74 PNG, 163–64 Podolsky, Boris, 261 Pole Position, 34, 35f Pong, 24–25, 32, 32f possible futures, 12 posthuman civilization, 111–13 Princeton’s Advanced Engineering Research Lab (PEAR), 76 probability wave for a particle, 128f procedural generation, 47 procedurally generated world, 51 “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” (Shannon, 1950), 85 Project Blue Book, 232 purely deterministic model, 125 Q QI (quantum indeterminancy), 11, 124 QI, philosophical questions raised by, 140–41 Qiyamah, Day of, 221–23 quanta, 10, 126–27, 161, 166–67, 181–82 quanta, of space, 167–69 quantized space and time, 173–76, 288 quantized time, 171–74 quantum computers, 257–260, 267, 273–74 quantum cryptography, 261 quantum entanglement, 179–182, 259–260 quantum entanglement and simulation, 261–63 quantum error correction, 259–260, 263 quantum foam, 168 quantum indeterminacy (QI), 11, 124, 134–35, 139–140, 253, 255, 257, 267, 282–83 quantum leap, 10, 127 quantum mechanics, 133, 168, 254–55, 259 quantum physics many worlds interpretation, 148–150 as new physics, 126–27 physical reality as quantized, 281–82 and physical world, 122–23 quanta in, 166–67 rendering engines based on QI, 283–84 and subjective reality, 10–13 quantum probability wave, 10–11, 130, 253 quantum probability wave, collapse of, 129–130 quantum superposition, 132–34 qubits (quantum bits), 258 quests, 285–86 quests and achievements, 210–11 quests and storylines, 41 R Raiders of the Lost Ark, 38 random number generators (RNGs), 76 raster image, 163–64 Ready Player One, 56–57, 61 “real object” definition, 68–69 reality nature of, 6 world views and religion, 5 real-time motion controls, 36 real-world rendering, 67 rebirth, 201 Reid, Harry, 232 reincarnation, 285–86 reincarnation, theoretical model, 205–8, 206f religion, mysticism and simulation hypothesis, 13–16 remote viewing, 243–44 rendered pixels, 135 rendered world, 42 rendering engine, 3D, 59 rendering engine rules, 138 rendering engine vs. physical engine, 51 rendering engines 2D to 3D, 58–59 and 3D world rendering, 66–67, 123 based on quantum indeterminacy, 282–83 for real world, 3D printers as, 69–71 and Simulation Point, 63–64 speed of, 66–67 rendering engines, speed of, 66 rendering engines vs. physical engines, 51 The Republic (Plato), 5, 270 resource argument, 250–52 retrocausality, 146 retrocausation, 160 Ricard, Matthieu, 207 Ringel, Zohar, 251–52 RNGs (random number generators), 76 role-playing games (RPGs), 38 role-playing games (RPGs), graphical, 39–42 room-scale VR, 55–56 Rosen, Nathan, 178, 261 RPGs (role-playing games), 38 RPGs (role-playing games), graphical, 39–42 Rucker, Rudy, 251–52 Rumi, 183 Rutherford, Ernest, 125, 167–68 Rutherford-Bohr planetary model, 125 S Samsara, 201 Sauvageau, Joe, 254–55 Savage, Martin J., 255 Saved by the Light (Brinkley, 1994), 229–230 Schrödinger, Erwin, 125, 132–34 Schrödinger’s Cat, 132–34, 140, 149, 259 science, goal of, 6 Science Advances, 251–52 scroll of deeds, 222–23 Second Life, 4, 45–46, 50, 56, 71, 177, 180, 191, 209–10, 213 Sedol, Lee, 87 Sega Genesis, 38 The Self-Aware Universe (Goswami), 133 self-contained world (video games), 2–3 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 236 seventh yoga, 197–99 Shannon, Claude, 23, 85–86, 104 Siddhartha Gautama, 203 simple programs, 266 The Sims, 4 simulated artificial intelligence (SAI), 281 simulated consciousness, 17–18 simulated world, 3 Simulation Argument, 5, 24–26, 110–11, 112f simulation game, 3–4 simulation hypothesis, 16 AI, gods and angels, 226–28 and conscious based arguments, 267 and dreams, 196–97 experiments for, 254–55 to explain the unexplainable, 20–21 fundamental question of, 4–5 the Great Simulation, 19–20 implications of Plato’s allegory of the cave, 270–71 OBEs, remote viewing, telepathy and other “unexplained” phenomena, 241–44 and parallel universes, 159–160 and quantum indeterminacy (QI), 139–140 and quantum physics, 10–13 and quests, 213–14 in religion and mysticism, 13–16 and resource based arguments, 267 and science fiction, 6–10 and simulations, computation and chaos, 18–19 storage of consciousness, 117 video game model based on karma, 211–13 virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and simulated consciousness, 16–18 as world explanation, 118–19 simulation hypothesis, arguments/experiment categories evidence of conditional rendering, 248–49 evidence of consciousness, 248 evidence of negation, 248 evidence of pixels or computation, 249 Simulation point, 20, 25–26 simulation point, stages current stage, 49–52 definition of, 26–27 reaching stage 9, 92–94 stage 0: text adventures and game worlds (1970s to mid-1980s), 27–31 stage 1: graphic arcade and console games (1970s-1980s), 32–38 stage 2: graphical adventure / RPG games (1980s- 1990s), 38–42 stage 3: 3D rendered MMORPGs and virtual worlds (1990s-Today), 42–48 stage 4: immersion using virtual reality, 54–62 stage 5: photorealistic augmented and mixed reality (AR, MR), 62–66 stage 6: real-world rendering: light-field display and 3D printing, 66–72 stage 7: mind interfaces, 72–77 stage 8: implanted memories, 77–80 stage 9: artificial intelligence and NPCs, 82–84 stage 10: downloadable consciousness and digital immortality, 100 stage 11: reaching the simulation point, 107–8 simulation point, defining, 107–8t simulation point, stage 9 requirements ability to create further AI, 94 learning over time, 93–94 Natural Language Processing (NLP), 92 natural language response, AI/NPCs, 92 physical interactions, 94 spatial awareness, 94 voice output, AI/NPCs, 93 voice recognition, AI/NPCs, 93 simulations, 153–55 simultaneity between events, 12 single-player text adventures, 27–31 singularity, 82, 100–101 The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil, 2005), 101 Siri, 88 Six Yogas of Naropa (Tsongkhapa), 192, 198 skeptics: resource argument, 250–52 Skyfall, 70 SNLP (statistical NLP), 89–90 social media and AGI, 98 Sony PlayStation VR headset, 60 Sophia (robot), 91, 91f souls, 285–86 Space Invaders, 34, 35f, 36, 82, 87, 208, 273 space time, 181–82 space time, instant travel, simulation overview, 176 quantum entanglement, 176, 180–81 teleportation, 176–78 wormholes, 176, 178–180 SpaceWar!

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. [←59] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience [←60] https://dannionandkathrynbrinkley.com/dannions-ndes/ [←61] https://www.history.com/topics/paranormal/project-blue-book [←62] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html [←63] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612232/the-8-dimensional-space-that-must-be-searched-for-alien-life/ [←64] Jacques Vallee, “A Theory of Everything (Else),” TED Talk video presentation, 2011, www.jacquesvallee.com. [←65] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Bodies_Doctrine_(Vedanta) [←66] Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007) 161. [←67] https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/amp/ncna913926 (Corey Powell) [←68] http://serious-science.org/skepticism-and-the-simulation-hypothesis-6189 [←69] https://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html [←70] Andrew Masterson, “Matrix Phobia?

The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds

death from overwork, deliberate practice, fear of failure, Hans Rosling, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, mirror neurons, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

The Naked Presenter is a book whose time has come. Shedding everything to focus on the audience and the content is the true secret to great presentations. Now, Garr is sharing that secret (and how to do it) with the world. Thank you, Garr!” —Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation “You’ve probably watched a TED Talk, or seen someone who just owns the stage like Tom Peters and has the audience gasping for more, but did you know that you too can deliver presentations that get great reviews? You can by being a Naked Presenter. I’ve used these techniques to be a better presenter and they work. Use them and your audience will rave about your presentations.

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As long as the imagery is relevant, the strong feelings the images evoke can increase attention and make the message more memorable. A flood in a distant land seems like an abstraction, but add high-impact vivid imagery of that flood and it becomes real and touches the viewer on a visceral level. In his 2009 TED talk, Information Designer Tom Wujec suggested we use images in three ways: (1) to clarify ideas, (2) to create engagement with our ideas, and (3) to augment memory with persistent and evolving views. 154 The Naked Presenter Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> tTake a poll. I once saw a presenter begin her talk this way: “How many people in the room think there are more women than men in the world?

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

Soon she had collaborators on board with doctorates from Oxford and Stanford, with math and simulations confirming the idea was viable in theory. It was enough to attract a first round of funding and a talented chief technology officer who had initially been highly skeptical. “Once I showed him all the patents, he said, ‘Oh sh*t, this actually can work.’” In a popular TED talk and book, Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. This is excellent advice—unless you’re doing something original that challenges the status quo. When people championing moral change explain their why, it runs the risk of clashing with deep-seated convictions.

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Gersick, “Marking Time: Predictable Transitions in Task Groups,” Academy of Management Journal 32 (1989): 274–309, and “Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm,” Academy of Management Review 16 (1991): 10–36. halftimes can be so influential: Nancy Katz, “Sports Teams as a Model for Workplace Teams: Lessons and Liabilities,” Academy of Management Executive 15 (2001): 56–67. “The number one thing”: Bill Gross, “The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups Succeed,” TED Talks, June 2015, www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed/transcript. a first-mover advantage: Lisa E. Bolton, “Believing in First Mover Advantage,” manuscript under review. These edges create barriers: Marvin B. Lieberman and David B. Montgomery, “First-Mover Advantages,” Strategic Management Journal 9 (1988): 41–58; Montgomery and Lieberman, “First-Mover (Dis)advantages: Retrospective and Link with the Resource-Based View,” Strategic Management Journal 19 (1998): 1111–25.

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Asch, “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Scientific American 193 (1955): 31–35, and “Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs 70 (1956): 1–70; see also Rod Bond and Peter B. Smith, “Culture and Conformity: A Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) Line Judgment Task,” Psychological Bulletin 119 (1996): 111–37. “The first follower”: Derek Sivers, “How to Start a Movement,” TED Talks, April 2010, www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement/transcript?language=en. “Never doubt that a small group”: Margaret Mead, The World Ahead: An Anthropologist Anticipates the Future, ed. Robert B. Textor (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). just having one friend: Sigal G. Barsade and Hakan Ozcelik, “Not Alone But Lonely: Work Loneliness and Employee Performance,” working paper (2011).

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

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

Here’s what they’ve found by administering standard personality tests over the decades: College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of twenty or thirty years ago.9 (And they’re more narcissistic, as tracked by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory over the same time frame.10) Other social scientists worry about ethics, or the “moral sense” that Charles Darwin thought was unique to humans. It is unlikely there will ever be a rigorous longitudinal study of this, and yet the perception is widespread that many parts of the world are experiencing declines. And then there is creativity. If you’re a fan of TED Talks, perhaps you saw the one that became the most viewed of the entire TED library: Sir Ken Robinson’s “How Schools Kill Creativity.” In it, Robinson argues that “[w]e don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we are educated out of it.” Children are naturally creative, he claims, but as they grow up, “we start to educate them progressively from the waist up and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.”

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

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

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy by David Sawyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, beat the dealer, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Cal Newport, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, Desert Island Discs, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, financial independence, follow your passion, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, index card, index fund, invention of the wheel, John Bogle, knowledge worker, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, passive income, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart meter, Snapchat, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, The 4% rule, Tim Cook: Apple, Vanguard fund, William Bengen, work culture , Y Combinator

It’s not about conquering your fear; it’s about learning to act despite it. Doubt is good, too. Always beware the over-confident. Real experts spend most of their time scared they’ve got it wrong. Master your instant gratification monkey. Wait But Why’s Tim Urban is an arch-procrastinator, whose TED talk on the topic has 11m views. Interviewed on the Art of Charm[462] podcast, he talks about the limbic brain being the instant gratification monkey, which always dominates the rational decision-maker in all of us, until the “panic monster” roars into the room with minutes to go, leading the rational decision-maker to wrest control.

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Those chats with your neighbours, people at the school gate, the bloke serving you coffee at Starbucks, the guard on the train; it’s those daily interactions on which we place no emphasis that make a long life. How much, and with what positivity, you interact with people who don’t mean a great deal to you as you move through your day. Watch Susan Pinker’s TED talk[494], and the next time the old lady passes your house with her doddery dog, ask her how she’s doing. She’d like that. 12. Go it alone Self-employment is not for the faint-hearted. Eight out of ten entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months, according to Bloomberg[495].

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[491] “ghosts haunting the lost landscapes of our childhood”: “THE WRITING LIFE: TALES OUT OF SCHOOL – The Washington Post.” 18 Mar. 1997, toreset.me/491. [492] The Pomodoro [productivity] Technique: “Pomodoro Technique – Wikipedia.” toreset.me/492. [493] In a meta-analysis of 300,000-plus people: “Social Ties Boost Survival by 50 Per Cent – Scientific American.” 28 Jul. 2010, toreset.me/493. [494] Watch Susan Pinker’s TED talk: “The secret to living longer may be your social life – TED.com.” 18 Aug. 2017, toreset.me/494. [495] businesses fail within the first 18 months, according to Bloomberg: “Five Reasons 8 Out Of 10 Businesses Fail – Forbes.” 12 Sep. 2013, toreset.me/495. [496] joining the ranks of the one in 25 UK workers who work for themselves: “Rise in self-employment transforms UK – Financial Times.” 15 Oct. 2017, toreset.me/496

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin

affirmative action, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, delayed gratification, edge city, facts on the ground, financial independence, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, post-work, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Results Only Work Environment, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, union organizing, upwardly mobile, white picket fence, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional

Children with involved fathers measure as having higher IQs by age three, higher self-esteem, and in the case of daughters, grow up to be less promiscuous. Deciding on more equitable child-care arrangements is not just a logistical matter; it’s about rooting out deep and crippling assumptions women hold long before they even have children. Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook beautifully reframed the issue of women and work in her 2010 TED talk with her memorable phrase “Don’t leave before you leave.” The phrase was attached to a story about a young woman at Facebook who came into her office agonizning about how she would balance work and a child. The woman looked very young, so Sandberg asked her, “Are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?”

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Secord, Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1983). On the cover of Guyland: Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo: Philip Zimbardo, “The Demise of Guys?” TED Talk, March 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html. This is the argument: Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986). More recently, Baumeister put that theory: Roy F. Baumeister, “Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive,” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 3 (2000): 347–374.

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a massive Department of Education study, a child’s grades: “Fathers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Schools,” National Center for Education Statistics 98-091, September 1997, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs98/fathers/. memorable phrase “Don’t leave before you leave”: Sheryl Sandberg, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” TED Talk, December 2010. http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html. “There was no having it all”: Barbara Walters, interview with Jane Pauley in 2003, quoted in Pamela Paul, “For Anchorwomen, Family Is Part of the Job,” The New York Times, December 9, 2011. as Fox’s Megyn Kelly did: Back from maternity leave on August 8, 2011, Megyn Kelly showed a photograph of her baby daughter, Yardley Evans, to viewers of America Live.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

He described bullshit as what people create when they try to impress you or persuade you, without any concern for whether what they are saying is true or false, correct or incorrect. Think about a high school English essay you wrote without actually reading the book, a wannabe modernist painter’s description of his artistic vision, or a Silicon Valley tech bro co-opting a TED Talk invitation to launch his latest startup venue. The intention may be to mislead, but it need not be. Sometimes we are put on the spot and yet have nothing to say. The bullshit we produce under those circumstances is little more than the “filling of space with the inconsequential.” Bullshit can be total nonsense.

…

It’s easy to call bullshit on that statement when it stands by itself. And when you do so, perhaps your friend will simply laugh and admit, “Yeah, I made that up.” But suppose instead she doubles down and starts filling out—or making up—details to support her claim. “No, really, it’s true. I saw this TED Talk about it. They explained how cat owners value independence whereas dog owners value loyalty. People who value independence are more likely to have NVT…no…NVS…I can’t remember, but some kind of personality. And that makes them better able to rise in the workplace.” This is full-on bullshit, and it functions like one of Latour’s black boxes.

…

The problem is the hype, the notion that something magical will emerge if only we can accumulate data on a large enough scale. We just need to be reminded: Big data is not better; it’s just bigger. And it certainly doesn’t speak for itself. In 2014, TED Conferences and the XPrize Foundation announced an award for “the first artificial intelligence to come to this stage and give a TED Talk compelling enough to win a standing ovation from the audience.” People worry that AI has surpassed humans, but we doubt AI will claim this award anytime soon. One might think that the TED brand of bullshit is just a cocktail of sound-bite science, management-speak, and techno-optimism. But it’s not so easy.

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

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

Like Goostman, they have no real understanding, and so c­ an’t ­really connect with us—or, too often, help us. 228 T he P rob­lem of I nference Narrowness is endemic to systems like Watson that tackle natu­ral language. As we saw in prior sections, this is ­because acts like reading and conversing are actually deep, open-­ended feats of inference, requiring understanding of the world. Google Talk to Books, showcased predictably with much fanfare by Ray Kurzweil in a TED talk in 2018, promised an unparalleled question-­a nswering capability by, as Quartz put it, “reading thousands of books.”13 In fact, it indexed about one hundred thousand books, encoding sentences numerically in vectors (data structures), and using deep learning (what ­else?) to compute their similarity to other vectors.

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Markram is known for his Blue Brain proj­ect, an ambitious attempt to model an entire neocortical column in a rat’s brain in silica, in a computer simulation on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The ­Human Brain Proj­ect’s goals expand Blue Brain’s scope to include no less than a complete computer simulation of the entire ­human brain, a goal that Markram announced in a 2009 TED talk would be met by the end of the decade—­though many other neuroscientists disagreed. Like futuristic claims made about AI, Markram’s prognostications ­were wrong—­very wrong—­and fortunately for science, the failure of his predictions was not altogether ignored. Writing in The Atlantic in 2019, Ed Yong remarked succinctly on what other neuroscientists had been predicting all along: “It’s been ten years.

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Markram soon stepped down, but the proj­ect was retooled as software 268 T he F ­ uture of the M yth engineering—­arguably less infected with AI my­thol­ogy, but toothless for fundamental research by design.9 As Columbia University neuroscientist Eric Kandel put it, referring to the United States’ BRAIN Initiative when it first launched, “We knew the endpoint [for the ­Human Genome Proj­ect] . . . . ​But ­here, we d­ on’t know what the goal is. What does it mean to understand the ­human mind? When ­w ill we be satisfied? This is much, much more ambitious.”10 When the ten-­year anniversary of Markram’s now notorious TED talk proclaiming that our brains would be mapped into a supercomputer—­the ultimate statement of my­thol­ogy about AI—­came in 2019, Scientific American (no e­ nemy of ­f uture ideas about science) and The Atlantic both published searching accounts of what went wrong.11 As one scientist put it, “We have brains in skulls.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

Valuable ad inventory was measured by page views and time-on-site. And what does search do? It shuffles you off the site as fast as you can go. That didn’t strike anyone as a good business model. But Google of course stuck with it—and rewrote the rules of online advertising. Or think of TED Talks. When my Masters of Scale colleague June Cohen first pitched the idea of putting TED Talks online, it was widely seen as a very small, very bad idea. Putting taped lectures online? Who would possibly watch them? And wouldn’t it capsize the business model of an expensive conference to give the content away for free? Of course, the opposite happened: The talks were an immediate viral hit, and so massively increased demand for the conference that the ticket price rose 5x—to $10,000—in the years that followed.

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PHOTO: © LORI PEDRICK June Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of WaitWhat, a media invention company that makes podcasts, live events, professional courses, and more, with a unique business model that develops horizontal integration around strong brands, such as the award-winning business podcast Masters of Scale, the tech+ethics show Should This Exist?, the creativity podcast Spark & Fire, and the nothing-else-like-it hit Meditative Story. Prior to co-founding WaitWhat in January 2017, June headed up media for TED, building its digital media operations from the ground up. In 2006, she launched TED Talks on the internet. And in 2009, she introduced the TED Open Translation Project, the largest subtitling effort in the world, with 120 languages, 20,000 translators, and 100,000 translations. She co-hosted the annual TED Conference with Chris Anderson and co-founded the annual TEDWomen with Pat Mitchell.

Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully by Kelly Starrett, Juliet Starrett

airport security, call centre, COVID-19, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microdosing, Minecraft, phenotype, place-making, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

And, of course, it’s our wily brains that have helped us—except for the odd angry hippo (see this page)—dominate the animal kingdom. But some people believe, and we are among them, that the brain’s most important job is to direct the body’s movements. Columbia University neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert subscribes to that theory, too, and he made the case for it during a TED Talk way back in 2011. As he spoke, Wolpert flashed a photo of sea squirts on the screen, hardly what you’d expect to see in a lecture titled “The Real Reason for Brains.” The sea squirt is an exceedingly humble animal, and the particular variety up on Wolpert’s screen—opaque with a ribbed, cellulose-like body—looked like an empty water bottle.

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When young, the animal swims freely around the ocean, but eventually it finds a suitable rock, attaches itself, and stays there for the rest of its life. Once ensconced, the sea squirt ingests its brain and nervous system. Strange, yes, but also quite efficient: Now that it’s completely sedentary, the sea squirt doesn’t need them anymore. “Movement,” Wolpert told his TED Talk audience, “is the most important function of the brain.” Physical Practice: Hip Mobilizations Most of us use our bodies in asymmetrical ways. It’s unlikely that you will spend as much time in hip extension as you do in hip flexion, and no one—least of all us—expects you to. And you don’t need to.

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See also movement-rich environment changing habits at work, 237–40 energy expenditure and, 232 hip extension and, 77 kids and, 236–37 while working, 240–44, 272–78 standing desk, 18, 86, 113, 232, 234–43 Standing Isometric, 98, 98, 270, 275 Standing Workstation, 240–44 Stanford University, 114 Star Wars (films), 63 steps, tracking, 102, 117–19, 279 Steps-Per-Day Inventory, 103–8, 270 stiffness, 15, 72–73, 91, 143 stress, 15, 17, 65, 72, 116, 129, 255 stretching, 23–24 static, 21 stroke, 168, 205 Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN), 168–69 substance abuse, 208 surfing, 60, 161 surgery, 137–39, 150, 160, 174, 221 swimming, 60, 65, 68, 128, 171, 201, 217, 235 sympathetic nervous system, 65 Synkowski, EC, 155–56, 167, 169 system support, 22–23 T Tabata Squats, 204, 271, 274, 278 tai chi, 50, 218, 219 technology, bedtime and, 260–62 TED Talks, 93, 94 teeth, 64, 129 television, 261, 262 temperatures, extreme, 68–69 Templer, Paul, 67, 68 tendons, 110, 172 tennis elbow, 136 “10 Minute Squat Test, The” (video), 199 “10s, the,” 281 tests, 6–7, 18, 155.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Small amounts of regular cash have an outsized power because they mitigate the ups and downs of income cycles. They reduce the feeling of living on the brink, which research unsurprisingly shows causes immense amounts of stress and poor decision-making. Historian Rutger Bergman made the provocative argument in a TED Talk that people aren’t poor because they make bad decisions, but that they make bad decisions because they are poor. Why do “the poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthfully?” he asked. It’s not because they are dim or lazy, but because they live in a mentality of scarcity.

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Center for Economic Progress, 2016. http://www.economicprogress.org/sites/economicprogress.org/files/restructuring_the_eitc_a_credit_for_the_modern_worker_0.pdf. Bloom, Ester. “It’s Not Your Imagination: Things Are More Expensive Than They Were 10 Years Ago.” CNBC, April 25, 2017. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/things-are-more-expensive-than-they-were-10-years-ago.html. Bregman, Rutger. “Poverty Isn’t a Lack of Character; It’s a Lack of Cash.” TED Talks, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lack_of_character_it_s_a_lack_of_cash/transcript?language=en. ———. Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek. Translated by Elizabeth Manton. The Correspondent, 2016. Bridgman, Benjamin, Andrew Dugan, Mikhael Lal, Matthew Osborne, and Shaunda Villones.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

But this is expected to change. Encouraging consumers to think about where their pension money is invested is the latest campaign of Richard Curtis, the UK film director behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, who is now a UN advocate for the sustainable development goals. He recalls watching a TED talk by Bronwyn King, an oncologist who discovered that her investment funds had holdings in tobacco companies, and realising that people’s ‘financial footprint’ is even more important than changes in their lifestyle as a consumer. His Make My Money Matter movement is aimed at encouraging pension holders and savers to push their money into sustainable investments and engage with their employers to do the same with their pension funds.

…

That proved to be an unstable source, with the global financial crisis of 2008 leading some governments – notably in Spain, which had been a huge champion of solar energy – to slash subsidies. Meanwhile companies in the US and Europe went out of business after China introduced its own aggressive subsidies, which, combined with cheaper labour and production costs, helped to flood the market with supply when demand was still low, causing prices to crash. In a now-infamous 2007 TED talk, John Doerr, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, said: ‘Green technologies – “going green” – is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.’ Unfortunately, good ideas do not always equal good investments. A 2016 report from MIT found that venture capital firms spent over $25bn funding clean energy technology start-ups between 2006 and 2011 and lost over half their money.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

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

Ancient Egyptians learned how to build the pyramids, but then that knowledge was lost. The same happened to Rome, which built aqueducts and other wonders that were lost in the Dark Ages. Was that happening to America? “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves,” he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. “It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.” Another motivation was that colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet. It may someday be destroyed by an asteroid or climate change or nuclear war.

…

“He was convinced that by the time we got Model Y into production it would be a full-on Robotaxi, fully autonomous,” von Holzhausen says. Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that Full Self-Driving was just a year or two away. “When will someone be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they’ve arrived?” Chris Anderson asked him at a TED Talk in May 2017. “That’s about two years,” Musk replied. In an interview with Kara Swisher at a Code Conference at the end of 2018, he said Tesla was “on track to do it next year.” In early 2019, he doubled down. “I think we will be feature complete, Full Self-Driving, this year,” he declared on a podcast with ARK Invest.

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.,” Business Insider, Feb. 22, 2018; Jeremy Arnold, “Journalism and the Blood Emeralds Story,” Save Journalism, Substack, Mar. 9, 2021; Vance, Elon Musk; Maye Musk, A Woman. 2. A Mind of His Own: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk. Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow,” Rolling Stone, Nov. 15, 2017; Elon Musk, TED Talk with Chris Anderson, Apr. 14, 2022; “Inter-galactic Family Feud,” Mail on Sunday, Mar. 17, 2018; Vance, Elon Musk; Maye Musk, A Woman. 3. Life with Father: Author’s interviews with Maye Musk, Errol Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Kimbal Musk, Peter Rive. Elon Musk report cards from Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Glenashley Senior Primary School, Bryanston High School, and Pretoria Boys High School; Neil Strauss, “The Architect of Tomorrow”; Emily Lane Fox, “How Elon Musk’s Mom (and Her Twin Sister) Raised the First Family of Tech,” Vanity Fair, Oct. 21, 2015; Andrew Smith, “Emissary of the Future,” The Telegraph (London), Jan. 8, 2014. 4.

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

[11] Great engineers also demand great team leaders, because crappy leaders not only tend to be too insecure to deal with great engineers, but also tend to boss people around. [12] When consensus can’t be reached, some teams have their leads decide, while other teams put it to a vote. The process your team uses is less important than having a process and sticking with it when there’s conflict. [13] In other words, team pride. [14] See Susan Cain’s excellent TED Talk, “The Power of Introverts” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4), or her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts (Crown). [15] We can’t stress enough how important this is—saying no to all of the distractions is what keeps you focused. [16] We’ve often likened writing open source software to building card houses on a trampoline.

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v=t4AqxNekecY. [35] Public criticism of an individual is rarely necessary, and most often is just mean or cruel. You can be sure the rest of the team already knows when an individual has failed, so there’s no need to rub it in. [36] As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, see also Dan’s fantastic TED talk on this subject. [37] This assumes that the engineers in question are being paid well enough that income is not a source of stress. [38] Of course, this assumes that you have engineers on your team who don’t need micromanagement. [39] Of course, it also means they’re more valuable and marketable employees, so it’s easier for them to pick up and leave you if they’re not enjoying their work.

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

If the data includes, for example, “One date/time category and any number of other categories or measures,” the program will automatically generate a line chart.7 * * * Purposes and Types of Visual Analytics IF YOU WANT TO: See relationships among data points: Scatterplot: Shows the relationship between two variables on a two-dimensional grid Matrix plot: For showing relationships and frequencies for hierarchical variables Heat map: Individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors Network diagram: Shows relationships between entities and the strengths of the paths between them Compare a set of frequencies or values, typically for one variable: Bar chart: Length of bar represents values Histogram: Type of bar chart with bars showing frequencies of data at specified intervals Bubble chart: Displays a set of numeric values as circles, with the size of the circle corresponding to the value Show the rise and fall of one variable in relation to another (typically time): Line graph: Two-dimensional graph, typically with one variable or multiple variables with standardized data values Stack graph: Line graph with filled-in areas underneath the graph, typically showing change in multiple variables; can also show change in multiple categories with different colors See the parts of a whole and how they relate to each other: Pie chart: Displays distribution of values in one variable in a pie format; percentages of each value correspond to size of slices Tree map: Visual for showing the size of values in a hierarchical variable, such as world/continents/countries/population in each country Understand data across geography: Overlaying summarized data onto geographical maps with colors, bubbles, or spikes representing different values Analyzing text frequencies: Tag cloud: A visualization of word frequencies; more frequently used words are displayed in larger type Phrase net: Shows frequencies of combinations of words used together; more frequently used words are displayed in larger type * * * The types of visual analytics listed in the worksheet are static, but visual analytics are increasingly becoming dynamic and interactive. Swedish professor Hans Rosling popularized this approach with his frequently viewed TED Talk, which used visual analytics to show the changing population health relationships between developed and developing nations over time.8 Rosling has created a website called Gapminder (www.gapminder.org) that displays many of these types of interactive visual analytics. It is likely that we will see more of these interactive analytics to show movement in data over time, but they are not appropriate or necessary for all types of data and analyses.

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This list was adapted and modified from one on the IBM ManyEyes site; see http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/page/Visualization_Options.html. 7. This example is from the SAS Visual Analytics 5.1 User’s Guide, “Working with Automatic Charts,” http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/vaug/65384/ HTML/default/viewer.htm#n1xa25dv4fiyz6n1etsfkbz75ai0.htm. 8. Hans Rosling, “Stats That Reshape Your Worldview,” TED talk, February 2006, http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html. 9. While Schmitt’s group sometimes creates such videos in-house, this one was done by an external production company. 10. James Taylor, “Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics,” IBM Press, 2011. 11.

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. 2. Kara Swisher, ubiquitous journalist, entrepreneur, and conscience of the tech sector, was writing regularly about the urgent need for stronger leadership and accountability in the industry. 3. These ideas were explored in a TED talk Frances gave called “How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust” (TED Talk, TED2018, Vancouver, April 13, 2018). 4. Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban, “The Impact of the ‘Open’ Workspace on Human Collaboration,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2018). 5. We want to thank Tien Larson for helping us to finally get this diagram right. 6.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

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

Nielsen disagreed, saying Facebook still trailed Google, but it appeared to be only a matter of time before the two companies would agree that Facebook was #1. In March 2011, I saw a presentation that introduced the first seed of doubt into my rosy view of Facebook. The occasion was the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, the global launch pad for TED Talks. The eighteen-minute Talks are thematically organized over four days, providing brain candy to millions far beyond the conference. That year, the highlight for me was a nine-minute talk by Eli Pariser, the board president of MoveOn.org. Eli had an insight that his Facebook and Google feeds had stopped being neutral.

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When we thought about possible influencers for a national conversation, we realized we knew only a few people we could contact, all in technology and media. We had no relationships in government. The first potential opportunity was only a couple of weeks away, at the annual TED Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, ground zero for TED Talks. It would be the perfect platform for sharing Tristan’s message to leaders from the technology and entertainment industries, but we did not know if the organizers were even aware of Tristan’s ideas. They certainly had not offered an invitation to speak. Then a miracle occurred. Eli Pariser, whose legendary presentation on filter bubbles had mesmerized the TED audience in 2011, independently suggested to TED curator Chris Anderson that he add Tristan to the program.

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In the two years since I first realized there was a problem at Facebook, I have read several novels and many nonfiction volumes that helped me understand that problem. In this essay, I want to share my intellectual journey but also point to books and other media that shed light on the people, business practices, and culture that enabled it. My education about the dark side of social media began in 2011 with Eli Pariser’s groundbreaking TED Talk on filter bubbles. I recommend the video of that talk, as well as Eli’s book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). The book that energized me in early 2017 was Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, by Jonathan Taplin (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2017).

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

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

As each packet passes through any of the routing points on the network, it says, ‘hey, I’m trying to get to B, do you know where B is?’ and one of three answers will come back: ‘Yes! I am B,’ ‘Yes, B is over there’ or ‘No, but I’m sending you to another machine who might know where B is.’ When I check this summary with Vint, he tells me, ‘Well, it is a bit more organised than that! But you are not far off!’ In a 2009 TED talk, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School, explained this process by asking his audience to imagine they were at a sporting event and somebody asks for a beer. ‘It gets handed at the aisle and your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along, at risk to your own trousers, to get it to the destination.

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You can see Ken Robinson ask us to re-evaluate what we need from our educational systems, Steven Pinker tell you the world is less violent and then watch Robert Wright explain why that might be, along with a host of other mind-shifting presentations that make you see things from a different angle. I’ve come to see Chris because in putting together the TED talks he is probably assailed by more new ideas than pretty much anyone on the planet – and he has to make sense of them somehow. I ask him how he synthesises everything. ‘Well, like everyone else I’m on a journey,’ he says. ‘But there’s a very boring view of the world which is that ‘things happen’ and basically history is one thing after another, the idea that you really can’t say much about the future, other than it’s probably not going to be as good as you think.

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Thanks then to Felicia Spagnoli at Joule Biotechnologies for putting me in touch with John Ward ( Joule’s Senior Vice President of Production) and in doing so confirming that the idea for a carbon neutral petrol station that pulls its raw materials out of the sky isn’t bonkers. Paul Roberts got me to an underwater cabinet meeting in the Maldives and for that I will always be grateful. Laura Galloway of Galloway PR organised my meeting with Chris Anderson at TED, helped with clearances to quote numerous TED talks, took me out to dinner and remains generous, helpful and encouraging. She is also owed a cocktail the next time I’m in NYC. Rachel Nagler at Rubenstein PR organised for me to have my genetic profile processed by 23andMe. Rachel Whetstone, Anthony House and Carla LaFever (all of Google) formed a procession that led to Vint Cerf, and Nikki Fenwick and Aya Okuma helped me hook up with Dan Reicher.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Centrist, liberal magazines like the Economist have also ingratiated themselves into this camp, making deliberate efforts to play down left-wing doom-mongering over capitalism’s shortfalls, particularly since the global financial crisis has made a more absolutist defense of free markets and free enterprise untenable (full disclosure: this author previously worked for The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to the Economist, but which produces its own independent content). Some other characters in this ecosystem are harder to pin down and don’t fall neatly within these two groups. These include the (recently deceased) TED Talk celebrity Hans Rosling, who mastered the art of using charts and other visual aids to seduce his audiences with optimism, or Oxford economist Max Roser, whose website Our World in Data is a statistical mecca for the movement even if Roser hardly proselytizes the narrative himself. He also appears to be the only one who shows any remote concern for issues like inequality and climate change, the former which the other New Optimists consistently play down as either not being an essential component of well-being and the latter as a problem which science will find ways of resolving in due time.

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When Scottish philosopher David Hume provocatively stated that “tis not contrary to reason [by this meaning rationality] to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger”,7 he is saying that in purely utilitarian terms, it is possible to prefer a painless alternative (the end of the world) to a painful one (a scratched finger). But this is only a rational choice, not a reasonable one. Only somebody with omnicidal tendencies would feel compelled to do such a thing. Pinker may exalt his Enlightenment heroes with a zeal typically reserved for religious icons, but Hans Rosling, the late Swedish physician-turned-TED Talk star, took the supposedly unobjectionable rationality of optimism to the level of self-help. It’s not enough that facts are good and feelings bad, but that facts are so good that they become feelings themselves. In Factfulness, he appears oblivious to why his corporate audience would feel so giddy at the news that the world is so much better than people think: The basic facts about the world’s progress are so little known that I get invited to talk about them at conferences and corporate meetings all over the world.

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Because ingenuity is rampant as never before in this massively networked world and the rate of innovation is accelerated, through serendipitous searching, not deliberate planning.39 Pinker would have probably made similar claims in Enlightenment Now had he not devoted nearly the entirety of his chapter on science to vilifying the humanities.40 Even when not explicitly mentioned, they are nonetheless implied every time he downplays technological threats like AI or outright ignores the very real controversies over the growing power of Silicon Valley and its impact on democracy. If New Optimism sounds like one giant TED Talk by a hyper-optimistic tech guru or venture capitalist, it’s because it shares with these people the boundless overconfidence of a future we should be anticipating with dangerously few reservations. There would also probably not be much fightback from the New Optimist camp if Silicon Valley ideology insidiously becomes more mainstream.

Help for Women With ADHD: My Simple Strategies for Conquering Chaos by Joan Wilder

crowdsourcing, Firefox, impulse control, index card, TED Talk

You can find it in many ways, depending on how you operate. As always, ADHD coaches can really help. So can ADHD buddies, friends, and family members who are naturally good at prioritizing or have learned how. Books on goal setting can help. If books aren’t easy for you, search for audiobooks, podcasts, or Ted talks on prioritizing, or goal setting. If the Internet is daunting for you, get someone to help you do this. Getting Distracted and Sidetracked Ever have one of those songs that just won’t stop going around and around your head? Your brain is wired to obsess over unresolved issues. When you have something you need to remember, or an idea you want to pursue but you haven’t acted on it, it creates an open loop that nags at you and congests your thinking.

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

Through that, he’s learned how we can dramatically improve our own lives, often with very small changes. He has guided or been involved with ~1,000 deaths, and he’s spotted patterns we can all learn from. BJ is also a triple amputee due to an electrocution accident in college. His 2015 TED talk, “What Really Matters at the End of Life,” was among the top 15 most viewed TED talks of 2015. “Don’t believe everything that you think.” This was BJ’s answer to “what would you put on a billboard?” He wasn’t sure of the source but attributed it to a bumper sticker. By the end of this profile, you’ll see how BJ loves this type of absurdity.

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Spirit animal: Coconut octopus * * * Jane McGonigal Jane McGonigal, PhD (TW: @avantgame, janemcgonigal.com), is a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future and the author of the New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and the New York Times. She has been called one of the “Top Ten Innovators to Watch” by BusinessWeek and one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company. Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than 10 million times. Tetris as Therapy Have trouble getting to sleep? Try 10 minutes of Tetris. Recent research has demonstrated that Tetris—or Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled—can help overwrite negative visualization, which has applications for addiction (such as overeating), preventing PTSD, and, in my case, onset insomnia.

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Spirit animal: Jackalope * * * Brené Brown Dr. Brené Brown (TW: @BreneBrown, brenebrown.com) is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Brené’s 2010 TEDxHouston talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” has been viewed more than 31 million times and is one of the top five most viewed TED talks in the world. She has spent the past 13 years studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame. Brené is the New York Times best-selling author of Daring Greatly, The Gifts of Imperfection, and Rising Strong. Afraid and Brave Can Coexist “This idea that we’re either courageous or chicken shit is just not true, because most of us are afraid and brave at the exact same moment, all day long.”

So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport

adjacent possible, Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, deal flow, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, web application, winner-take-all economy

What’s important here, however, is that this explanation, though reasonable, contradicts the passion hypothesis, which instead emphasizes the immediate happiness that comes from matching your job to a true passion. Conclusion #3: Passion Is a Side Effect of Mastery Not long into his popular TED talk, titled “On the Surprising Science of Motivation,” author Daniel Pink, discussing his book Drive, tells the audience that he spent the last couple of years studying the science of human motivation. “I’m telling you, it’s not even close,” he says. “If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”

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Chapter Eleven Avoiding the Control Traps In which I explain the law of financial viability, which says you should only pursue a bid for more control if you have evidence that it’s something that people are willing to pay you for. Derek Sivers Is a Control Freak Not long into his 2010 TED talk on creativity and leadership, Derek Sivers plays a video clip of a crowd at an outdoor concert. A young man without a shirt starts dancing by himself. The audience members seated nearby look on curiously. “A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous,” Derek says. Soon, however, a second young man joins the first and starts dancing.

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

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

Lessons from Stanford, Harvard and MIT recorded, available for free on the internet? Wow. “I need to take some time off to learn a ton of subjects”, I thought. But of course, that time never came. I got back from work at 8PM, feeling exhausted, and while I enjoyed keeping my brain working, I usually watched a TED talk or a conference from the Singularity University, but was difficult to follow a course on Quantum Entanglement or Biochemistry at 11PM. With Sal’s videos, in their 13-minute format, I could enjoy learning at any time of the day. At a lunch break, on the train, after dinner, you name it. The concepts are easy, very well presented, and I cannot stress this enough, they are intuitive.

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If, on the other hand, your goal is to make people more conscious and aware of a particular problem, you might want to start by respecting them, and showing the merits of your way of living. Again, ask yourself, is it easier to convert 10% of the people to eat no meat at all, or is it easier to convince 50% to eat less meat? The answer is very simple, and the concept is well developed by Graham Hill in his short book Weekday Vegetarian: Finally, a Palatable Solution and TED Talk Why I’m a weekday vegetarian.226 Imagine yourself being committed to the cause. At some point, you will look at your last hamburger, or your last steak, and you will know that you will not be having any more of those, forever. Many people are not quite ready for that. So what if you were to start a more gradual, easier approach?

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

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

., “From Food Insufficiency towards Trade Dependency: A Historical Analysis of Global Food Availability,” Plos One (December 18, 2013). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24367545 14. Bjørn Lomborg, “Setting the Right Global Goals,” Project Syndicate (May 20, 2014). https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-identifies-the-areas-in-which-increased-development-spending-can-do-the-most-good 15. One is Audrey de Grey of Cambridge University, who gave a TED Talk on this topic: http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging 16. Peter F. Orazem, “Challenge Paper: Education,” Copenhagen Consensus Center (April 2014). http://copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/education 17. “Where have all the burglars gone?” The Economist (July 18, 2013). http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-seeing-less-and-less-crime-even-face-high-unemployment-and-economic 18.

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Bilmes, “The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan” (March 2013). https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=923 (Also see Chapter 2.) 4. I did this calculation for 2009. See: OECD, “Agricultural Policies in OECD Countries” (2009). http://www.oecd.org/tad/agricultural-policies/43239979.pdf 5. Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid (2009), p. 39. 6. Watch Duflo’s TED Talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_fight_poverty 7. We don’t see this “randomization” in the Book of Daniel. Modern studies are usually also “double blind,” which means neither the doctor nor the patients know who is getting which medicine. 8. Alfredo Morabia, “Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis and the evaluation of bloodletting,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (March 2006). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1383766/pdf/0158.pdf 9.

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

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