WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

This book is weightier than it looks! Extensively referenced, a call from the author for a radically new way to run businesses and live our lives, and a more optimistic take on AI and Robotics. I wish the references were organised as chapter end-notes or footnotes instead of in one long section at the end as hunting for the sources is almost impossible if you didn't highlight them in the first place. I'd recommend reading this in electronic instead of dead-tree format.

Tim O'Reilly draws us a map of a future where finally everyone realises that the evil is not technology itself, but the people in power who use technology for greed only, lacking any altruistic motives.

The book sits on the intersection of tech and economy, it talks about new technology-enhanced markets (uber, lyft, airbnb), but more importantly it draws a roadmap for how governments could learn from these new platforms. Become a platform itself, open up its data, speed up it's upgrades. Same as a software that's out on the market is constantly finetuned and debugged, government and its rules should constantly be finetuned and debugged. To fight those who are trying to game its system (like Google fighting the hackers).

I especially enjoyed the parts where O'Reilly focuses on the rottenness of the financial markets and how it leads to income inequality. He calls out the financial market with it's drive for constant shareholder value creation as the evil master algorithm. And criticises how big companies cash out on “thin value” (term coined by Umair Hague) which is any profit extracted through harm to others (tobacco industry, oil companies, unhealthy food, ..).

For anyone who fears that automation is going to eliminate most jobs, O'Reilly points towards all the challenges we are facing that could lead to the creation of so many new tech-supported work opportunities in the medical field, or combating climate control and it's effects.

I wish for a lot of CEOs to read this book and to have that soul-searching moment.