Trends

Is AI our enemy? Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov answers that question through Deep Thinking. It’s a fascinating record of how chess machine programming has evolved over decades, from a concept by Alan Turing to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer that finally defeated the grandmaster. Millenials should take notice. They missed the era when computers were easily out-maneuvered by good players. Kasparov walks us through that history. The problem wasn’t simply the feeble computation power (there are billions of possibilities in the first few moves, yet the fastest computers were much slower than today’s average smartphone).

Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind bears an ominous sub-title: “The Existential Threat of Big Tech”. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t deliver on its broad promise. A more accurate title would have been, “How Amazon and the Free Web Are Destroying Journalism”. That’s the area Foer understands well, from his career as a writer and editor at The Atlantic, Slate, and The New Republic. It’s his stint at the latter publication that fuels his theme.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, has been influential in financial markets and corporate transformations. It also has plenty of ideas relevant to social networking’s future. The book’s leading concept is that that collective intelligence – aggregating diverse opinions – can out-perform judgments made by alleged experts and executives. Estimates are better when they pool many invidividual investors’ bets; decisions are better when produced by decentralized organizations than by top-down initiatives.

I’ve been reading The Long Tail, the 2006 blockbuster extolling the unlimited consumer choice made possible by the internet. The book was written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Its title is now part of the marketing lexicon, and aptly captures the author’s thesis: there’s a lot of money to be made by offering goods beyond the top sellers. Niche products individually don’t account for much revenue, but cumulatively they add up to a lot of profit.

Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is a broad criticism of the internet. Lanier thinks cyberspace is full of unimaginative software. Web 2.0 is window dressing on a tired paradigm. Silicon Valley is funding trivial applications.not much better than than the hasty business plans of the dot-bomb era. Users have bought into a mash-up universe where authorship is not rewarded and content is divorced from context. Anonymity and incivility rule.