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Summary
Summary
WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of dismay. In today's economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O'Reilly, Silicon Valley's leading intellectual and the founder of O'Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today's WTF? technologies.
What is the future when an increasing number of jobs can be performed by intelligent machines instead of people, or done only by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to our consumer based societies--to workers and to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? Is income inequality and unemployment an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, or are there paths to a better future? What will happen to business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? How should companies organize themselves to take advantage of these new tools? What's the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional institutions? How can individuals continue to adapt and retrain? Will the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world survive the transition, and if not, what will replace them?
O'Reilly is "the man who can really can make a whole industry happen," according to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet (Google.) His genius over the past four decades has been to identify and to help shape our response to emerging technologies with world shaking potential--the World Wide Web, Open Source Software, Web 2.0, Open Government data, the Maker Movement, Big Data, and now AI. O'Reilly shares the techniques he's used at O'Reilly Media to make sense of and predict past innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today's world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He provides tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.
The core of the book's call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. O'Reilly replies, "Only if that's what we ask them to do! Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won't run out of work till we run out of problems." Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how they can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one? Whether technology brings the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn't inevitable. It's up to us!
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Everything is amazing, everything is horrible, and it's all moving too fast," writes O'Reilly, founder of a media company based in Silicon Valley, who describes himself as having spent most of his career thinking about the future. Here, he acknowledges that despite the amazing technological advances made in recent history, many people are trepidatious about the future, anticipating a dystopia in which robots have taken most human jobs. Who will save us from this coming to pass? It's the creators of "unicorns," posits O'Reilly-technologies that amaze, and then become quotidian, freeing people to pursue more creative work. Examples of unicorns, according to O'Reilly, include the automobile, the telephone, and, more recently, the iPhone and peer-to-peer services such as Lyft and Uber. To O'Reilly, these radical innovations arise more out of intellectual curiosity than avarice-though he doesn't make clear why this distinction matters. In his somewhat dreamy-eyed, utopian view of the future world, machine productivity will provide everyone's basic needs and humans will find new jobs that consist of nurturing and enriching each other's lives. The ideas are interesting but their presentation is long-winded. Nonetheless, O'Reilly has delivered an interesting, if somewhat breathless, look at what the future might hold. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A good-news, bad-news look at a world full of unicorns, robots, and wonderthe future, in other words, as seen by longtime innovation watcher O'Reilly."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," the great British futurist and sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed. Thus the rude but now commonplace acronym of media maven and venture capitalist O'Reilly's book: "The world today is full of things that once made us say WTF?' but are already well on their way to being the stuff of daily life." One such innovation was the LINUX operating system, a decentralized creation essentially given away for free, just as was the World Wide Web, and never mind all the people trying to monetize both, the source of exasperated cries of WTF on the part of techno-libertarians. There's magic, there's WTFery, and there are unicornsthe latter things like Siri and kindred bits of artificial intelligence that fulfill O'Reilly's requirements that they change the world while seeming at first impossible. (And how did we ever live without our iPhones, anyway?) The rub in all this, of course, is that people are being left behind in this glamorous future, a place of "thick marketplaces" and endless churn. It is on these matters that O'Reilly turns serious, if a trifle dreamy: "The future depends on what we choose," he intones. As such, it offers us chances to do such things as rethink government and how it delivers services, reconceive money and its place in our lives ("Money is like gas in the caryou need to pay attention or you'll end up on the side of the roadbut a successful business or a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations"), and so forth. The argument gets a little scattershot, but understandably, since the future is a big subject and the choices many. O'Reilly's vision is more Utopian than dystopian, even downright optimistic in a roundabout, creative-destruction sort of way. The positive outlook is refreshing and engaging. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Self-described technology evangelist O'Reilly poses an interesting question: Is there a way to acknowledge that technology is taking over our daily lives without being afraid of it? To put it another way: How are we to integrate new technologies self-driving cars, for example, or robots that are so smart they are replacing humans in the workplace without feeling like we've lost control of our lives? Well, O'Reilly says, we're kind of doing that already. He cites numerous examples of technological breakthroughs that seemed ominous at first but now are taken for granted: Google Maps, the iPhone, even the Internet. The worrisome or frightening has become the humdrum, something whose sudden absence would be a major inconvenience to us. So, rather than feeling confused or scared by new technologies, we should embrace them; rather than search for ways to exclude them from our lives, we should be in search of a harmonious existence. For technophobes, this is a comforting and user-friendly book; for technophiles, a celebration of the tremendous potential of new tech.--Pitt, David Copyright 2017 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Introduction: The WTF? Economy | p. ix |
| Part I Using the Right Maps | |
| 1 Seeing the Future in the Present | p. 3 |
| 2 Toward a Global Brain | p. 23 |
| 3 Learning from Lyft and Uber | p. 48 |
| 4 There isn't Just One Future | p. 71 |
| Part II Platform Thinking | |
| 5 Networks and the Nature of the Firm | p. 89 |
| 6 Thinking in Promises | p. 109 |
| 7 Government as a Platform | p. 125 |
| Part III A World Ruled by Algorithms | |
| 8 Managing a Workforce of Djinns | p. 153 |
| 9 "A Hot Temper Leaps O'er a Cold Decree" | p. 170 |
| 10 Media in the Age of Algorithms | p. 199 |
| 11 Our Skynet Moment | p. 229 |
| Part IV It's Up to Us | |
| 12 Rewriting the Rules | p. 255 |
| 13 Supermoney | p. 274 |
| 14 We Don't Have to Run Out of Jobs | p. 298 |
| 15 Don't Replace People, Augment Them | p. 320 |
| 16 Work on Stuff That Matters | p. 351 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 373 |
| Notes | p. 377 |
| Index | p. 407 |