Category: Future & Tech

  • Abundance

    Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

    Just so we are clear, the scope of this book is only the US, the rest of the world will have to figure its own way to abundance, though we might learn a few tricks from this. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wonder why, for all its enormous wealth and technological capability, the US cannot address the fundamental human problems of hunger, homelessness, life-threatening diseases, and fuel an equitable world with clean energy.

    Indeed, the introductory chapter ‘Beyond scarcity’ does imagine an utopian world really well. And it’s clear that it isn’t technology that is stopping us. Sigh.

    Through the analysis of political, economic and cultural ethos across decades, they trace the ‘how we got here’ to a scarcity-driven politics, not from the conservative right that likes to keep the government out of most things, but from the so-called progressives on the left. They identify a decades-long shift beginning in the 1970s – when American liberals became more concerned with process than outcomes, enforcing strict zoning codes, environmental regulations, and costly infrastructure mandates that, in real life, put the brakes on growth.

    I remember reading this point of view in Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay, where he says “there is too much law and too much ‘democracy’ relative to the American state capacity”. That it has now become a vetocracy, with economically powerful special interest groups and the judicial arm having hijacked the system and preventing reforms. Of course, given his leaning, it probably came from a different sentiment.

    A central theme is the critique of process and proceduralism. The book argues that when the Democratic-leaning coalition ties itself to onerous permitting processes, it inadvertently bolsters housing shortages, dilapidated transit systems, and underinvested public utilities – a supply problem across all infrastructure, leading to people at lower rungs being gated out. This can be seen now as a regulatory impasse in many liberal jurisdictions, where well-meaning (in isolation) rules and community objections prioritise preventing ‘bad’ development over enabling ‘good’ development.

    Klein and Thompson present their solution into an ‘Abundance Agenda,’ a Third Way framework aimed at rebalancing social goals and regulatory safeguards. This agenda aspires to dismantle needless barriers while preserving essential protections and build economic dynamism without sacrificing equity. A middle ground to a progressive movement fearful of change and a conservative movement allergic to any government action.

    While I liked the synthesis idea, the ‘how’ is not even a thought beyond a few small examplesof when such an approach has worked. Clearly, the challenges at higher scale would be massively different. These are diverse problems- housing, climate change, research , innovation, and mass deployment of this ‘abundance. I also wonder how capitalism would react to it. Elite capture of every resource has been a recurrent phenomenon, what is their take on an abundant life for everyone? Can humans really live without classes and status?

    Having said that, this is a very accessible and thought-through book. It provides an excellent systematic flow through the five chapters – each, with its own narrative of what is happening with examples, why it is happening seen through the lens of historical, economical and cultural contexts, and what can be done (directionally) to remedy it.

    Quotes & Notes from Abundance

    1. The fascinating story of Katalin Karikó and mRNA in ‘Invent’ (p 129)
    2. Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is one of the best examples of solving at scale. The creation and distribution of Covid vaccines in ‘Deploy’ (p 184)
    3. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again.” Paul Sabin

    Abundance Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  • Careless People

    Sarah Wynn-Williams

    As someone who has worked with founders in the startup space for over a decade and a half, the megalomania, the lack of empathy, and the moral bankruptcy in Careless People all seemed familiar. But Sarah Wynn-Williams’s first person account is about arguably the biggest phenomenon that has hit culture in the last decade and a half – social media, and specifically, the biggest player in it – Meta (then Facebook). She worked at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017, the time when Facebook went from infancy to a full-blown global power base.

    The book is a summary of moral bankruptcy and ethical failings in the company on two counts – one, the internal culture and decision-making process, and the other – the recklessness and callousness that powers its growth-at-all-costs approach, impacting the lives of millions of people through the ways in which the platform is used by bad actors.

    On the first count, toxic behaviour, rampant and blatant sexual harassment by her own boss Joel Kaplan as well as Sheryl Sandberg (who allegedly said “You should have got into the bed” from a chapter titled ‘Lean in and Lie back’), and injustice in general. On the second, everything from helping China in surveilling its own citizens (and lying about it to the US lawmakers) to making politicians addicted to advertising so they be influenced on policies, to the Trump election, to targeting teens when they’re depressed, to the subterfuge in Intenet.org, to the apathy in the Myanmar genocide. As the book’s subtitle says, power, greed, madness.

    The book begins with a hilarious incident at the 2015 Summit of the Americas, one of her early attempts to get Zuck to interact with politicians, and then goes right back to the time she decided Facebook is where she wanted to work at. I am still figuring out if the early part of the first chapter (her encounter with a shark) is a metaphor – for swimming with sharks later, or being a survivor.

    In a way, Careless People is also like a biography of Facebook itself- the kind of problems it faced in its early days – from poop emojis to ISIS beheadings to Kony and breastfeeding protests! There really was no playbook for creating policies for these things!

    The book is full of anecdotes – from the early idealistic days to connect humanity to the cold, inhuman approach that one is now familiar with. Catching Hillary Clinton on a dance floor in Columbia, Sheryl un-walking a lot of the talk from Lean In when it came to her own employees, and lying about narrowly missing a plane crash, Zuck’s failed attempts at courting Xi (anything to get a handshake, Xi refusing Zuck’s request to name his unborn child), how one low-ranking official in TRAI unwittingly scuttled Facebook’s populist move to get Free Basics running in India by opting out of all emails from Facebook, Obama telling Zuck in a private meeting that Facebook is playing a destructive role globally and so on. And peppered with her own encounters with non-human organisms – sharks, wasps, (almost) Zika virus at its place of origin and so on.

    Careless People reads more like a thriller and is very accessible. One can easily sense the author’s frustration as idealism gives away to rampant greed and exploitation inside and outside. She doesn’t make it easy for herself with the blind idealism bordering on naïveté, and a work ethic that includes replying to a mail while in labour. Several times I wondered why she didn’t just quit, but later in Careless People, we get to know her own challenges. It is quite a read, and I’d definitely recommend it.

    Notes & Quotes from Careless People

    1. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face ~ John Updike
    2. WEF has weaponised the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the .001 per cent. (about Davos)
    3. The spyware Onavo showed Zuck which apps to buy by giving him confidential usage data
    4. Sheryl once explained the cycle of wealth to me as she saw it I was complaining that someone I really admired had retired from Facebook at a very young age. I couldn’t understand why they’d do that. What would they do instead that would be so interesting? She said matter-of-factly that they would probably follow the cycle of wealth she’d observed at Google and Facebook: exotic travel for a year or more before becoming bored of that, then transitioning to getting very fit or some other personal goal. After achieving that goal, buying a boat or some other extravagant hobby purchase, and then finally getting divorced or going through some other personal crisis. If they come back from that, maybe they attempt their own start-up or fund or, most likely, philanthropy.
    5. Uber weaponizes their drivers and riders, creating strikes, protests, and transportation chaos, forcing authorities to the table. They’re sponsoring the football teams of the children of key Brazilian senators responsible for decisions that impact their business, insisting on having UBER plastered across their kids’ uniforms. They propose compiling opposition research on journalists.
    6. Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima. Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”

    Careless People Sarah Wynn-Williams

  • The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma

    Mustafa Suleyman, Michael Bhaskar

    Co-founder of first DeepMind (the company behind a couple of massive leaps in AI – AlphaGo, AlphaFold, acquired by Google), then Inflection AI and now (before the book published, I think) CEO of Microsoft AI, I think there are few better people than Mustafa Suleyman to write about AI. And I suspect there will be few better moments than now. The Coming Wave was a book I was looking forward to reading, and it didn’t disappoint.

    The book is divided into four sections. The first looks at the history of technology and how it spreads. The second gets into the detailing of the coming wave – two general purpose technologies – AI and synthetic biology, and associated technologies like robotics and quantum computing. This section also goes into the features and incentives that drive them. Part 3 takes a side step into the political implications of this on the nation state, the only institution that can temper the wave. The last section looks at what is the ‘containment problem’ – a wave of technology is near impossible to contain, history has ample proof, but can we still take a shot at it.

    In the first section of The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how technology has a clear, inevitable trajectory: mass diffusion in great rolling waves. New discoveries are used by people to make cheaper food, better goods, more efficient transport etc. As demand grows, competition increases, the technology becomes better and cheaper, and easier to use. From farming to the internet, history has enough examples. A big challenge is that the inventor has no way of knowing the nth order consequence (the ‘revenge effects’ of technology – fridge makers didn’t start out with the intent to punch a hole in the ozone later), and once a technology is out there, there is very little we can do to contain it. From fossil fuel emissions to opioid abuse to space junk, this is the story. The only partial exception is nuclear weapons.

    There is a fascinating story in the beginning of the second section on DQN, an algorithm the DeepMind team created to play the game Breakout, and it discovered a strategy that most humans didn’t think of. The trailer for AlphaGo. The section also goes deep into synthetic biology and robotics. Apparently, one can buy a benchtop DNA synthesiser for $25k.

    But this section is even more important because it brings out the four intrinsic features of this wave that compound the containment problem. One, it has a hugely asymmetric impact. Which this has happened before (cannon vs a large set of people) it has been scaled massively with the internet and now AI (a single algorithm can hold massive systems to ransom). Two, they are developing fast – hyper-evolution – providing very little time to react, let alone regulate ((look at cars vs the frequency of the versions of GPT). Third, they are omni-use (AI can be applied in multiple domains, and can come up with compounds for cure or as poison). And fourth, its degree of autonomy is beyond any previous technology.

    Add to that the incentives and the containment problem just gets magnified. Geopolitics and the power involved, a global research system that has rituals rewarding open publication – curiosity and the pursuit of new ideas, financial gains, and the the most human one of all – ego.

    The third section of The Coming Wave is on the impact of all this on the nation state. He calls out that technology is not value-neutral, and quotes Langdon Winner, “Technology in its various manifestations is a significant part of the human world. Its structures, processes and alterations enter into and become part of the structures, processes and alterations of human consciousness, society and politics.” From the printing press to weapons, tech has helped build the nation state. My favourite chapter in this is ‘Fragility Amplifiers’ – from robots with guns to lab leaks to 3d printing everything, even people with good intent can cause things to go wrong. “What does the social contract look like if a select group of ‘post humans’ engineer themselves to some unreachable intellectual or physical plane?”Add to it massive job displacement, and other social issues and the nation state faces challenges far beyond the standard issues of the day. The possibilities are a continuum from an extremely powerful nation state to completely decentralised groups of individuals.

    In the last section, he looks at nine ways, working in cohesion to provide some sort of containment. Technical safety, audits, using choke points, maker responsibility to build in controls from the start, aligning business incentives with containment, helping governments build tech to regulate tech, international alliances for regulation and mitigation, a culture of sharing errors and learning from them, public input to make this all accountable. The tenth point he makes is that there is no silver bullet that will take us to any permanent solution. It is a narrow path which humanity must walk on. That probably is the biggest lesson.

    I found The Coming Wave full of great insights and perspectives, and written in a way that makes it accessible to those outside tech. An important book for everyone to read since it’s a pragmatic look at what the future holds for the species. Part of my 2024 favourites list.

    Notes
    1. (Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Civilisation
    2. Liverpool’s MP William Huskisson was killed under the wheels of the locomotive during the opening of the Liverpool – Manchester line, the first passenger railway because the crowd had no idea of the machine’s power!
    4. How the stirrup changed everything. Fused the rider to the horse, and the ability to power through. It became a leading offense strategy, and changed Europe. Horses – church land for rearing- ties to the kingdom – feudalism.
    3. Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people
    4. Primum non nocere – “first, do no harm”. (Hippocratic Oath)

    The Coming Wave

  • You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back

    Carol Roth

    Carol Roth does a great job of using the title to shock the reader, but once you read the book, you might agree that it is justified. It was at the World Economic Forum that she first heard the prediction that in less than a decade, private ownership would be dead. The book is her research on “You will own nothing and be happy“.

    She calls this a war where three kinds of forces – government and government-related forces, elite power-grabbers and bad actors, and Big Tech are colluding to ensure that they remain on top for the new financial order that will come up. Owning wealth and power.

    She begins with how frontline forces who risked their lives during the pandemic were punished, their livelihoods taken away, for non-compliance with a vaccine mandate. Moving quickly from social acceptance to social credit. Judged by public approval than a court of law. In China, they have already gone quite deep into the Social Credit System, where you’re watched and rewarded (red list)/penalised (black list).

    She uses the history of empires to show the cycles of rise and fall, and how war is usually a catalyst for change and a new financial order. The US began its ascent after WW2, and according to Roth (and data), we are now seeing a decline in the US financial system, which is likely to lead to a shift in power, and or economic and geopolitical chaos. And if we go by GoT, “Chaos is a ladder”.

    She also discusses Peter Thiel’s framework of how good ideas cause bad outcomes through a believers (idea)- racketeers (ROI) – Useful Idiots (ROE, e for ego). Think of climate change and read it as genuine activists – ESG sellers – regular people pandering to their desire for validation and ego by sharing posts/emojis/slogans without really understanding the discourse.

    The next chapters expand on the debasing of the dollar (some insightful charts on its decreasing purchasing power) and the huge concerns on turning it digital – CBDC (central bank digital currency) and how it can be used against the common person’s rights and freedoms. This allows a neat segue into Big Tech and how they have made us dependent, and infringed on our basic rights. Think of getting locked out of mail, social media, payments etc with no easy means of recourse. Most of us don’t really own anything digitally, it’s all on a company’s servers. They would serve as great allies of the government, possibly even overshadowing them with their technical superiority. Wars are almost more cyber than real, after all.

    She then does a deep dive on the various power and money grab mechanisms already underway. ESG, (thanks BlackRock!) for instance, played a crucial role in tanking Sri Lanka’s economy. The increasingly unattainable home ownership in US thanks to corporations, who are helped by cheap capital enabled by the Fed, competing against the common man for real estate. And city administrations who are happy to go along with AirBnB because they pay taxes. Add to this billionaires like Gates and institutions like Harvard (enabled by endowments) buying up farmland, including things like water rights. Now think about it, why wouldn’t private investors start moving water to say, nearest cities, because they think it’s the most efficient use of water?

    Another example is the crazy cost of education and the increasing lack of ROI, thereby creating a population that is always in debt. And guess who’s the one providing these loans – the government! And despite their ‘loan forgiveness’, ultimately it’s the taxpayer footing the bill! A transfer of money from the working class to the college-educated class.

    The final chapter is on how the common man (in the US context) can fight back against all this. While the context is the US, the ideology of capitalism and the alliance of government-corporations-BigTech is a global phenomenon, soon coming to a country near you.

    What was super insightful to me is the nuance of arguments. I had broadly supported the vaccine mandate, Biden, and was not fond of Joe Rogan, but I was forced to think deeply on all this. This is a fantastic read, and I absolutely recommend it.

    Quotes
    “When a social moral code replaces a legal code and gains acceptance it is only a matter of time before those in power want to leverage that dynamic to secure more power for themselves”
    ‘We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office’ ~ Aesop

    You Will Own Nothing

  • Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

    Tara Isabella Burton

    Strange Rites is another book I discovered only thanks to a podcast. I found it a fascinating exploration of how the (almost) post-religion United States is evolving. Folks who call themselves Christians have been steadily decreasing, and ‘Nones’ who claim no affiliation to any organised religion is the fastest growing group. One-third of millennials (and one fourth of all adults) have no affinity to religion. Tara Isabella Burton tries to find out who (or what) is filling the God-sized hole.

    She begins with her personal experience at the McKittrick Hotel, home to the British theatre company Punchdrunk’s production – Sleep No More, an experiential phenomenon that she describes as “equal parts video-game, voyeurism and religious pilgrimage”. It’s a retelling of Macbeth but every part of it is subject to interpretation by the performers and the audience, with the latter also having the option to be part of the ‘play’.

    This serves as a preview of the world of SoulCycle, Korean beauty routines, Gwyneth Paltrow’s juice cleanse, Crossfit, Internet fan fiction, Headspace, and so on. A long list of options from which people can mix their own religious cocktail of spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic and experiential dimensions. It influences not just individual lifestyle but societal politics too.

    The author broadly classifies the non-affiliated into SBNRs (Spiritual but not religious), Faithful Nones (who hunger for something larger than themselves) and Religious Hybrids (who practice a portion of their religion, and supplement it with things outside it). All of them (and us) are looking for what religion originally delivered – meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.

    She then spends a chapter on the war that has been fought on religion within America – the institutional (centred around Church and society) vs the intuitional (centred around the person). And that progression and the heterogenous mixes that happened reflects in the changes in culture and mindset within society during the 60s, 70s and so on.

    And thus, while the new forms of religion aren’t new, the author cites three factors that makes this era different and likely to stick around – the absence of wider demographic pressure, the power of consumer capitalism, and the rise of the internet. While millennials are caught between their lack of belief in their parents’ religion and the political conservatism on societal issues, capitalism finds a way in, helping them create identities and tribes. It will sell us meaning, brand our purpose, custom-produce community, tailor-make rituals and commodify our humanity. That includes a spiritual entrepreneurship course at the Columbia Business School!

    This new age version of religion (spiritualism) has an interesting parallel – the role that the printing press and the spread of mass literacy played for Protestantism is what the internet is doing today for new age movements. From Yahoo Groups for The X Files and Xena to Harry Potter and World of Warcraft, people were no longer bound to their geography to find their tribe. Fan fiction boomed. The author cites two watershed moments which show how ‘fans’ started taking ownership – the call for Rowling to step away from the Harry Potter universe after her fall from grace, and Gamergate, when there was a backlash against a section of gamers who wanted video games to address the interests and concerns of minority players. Though it wasn’t the first of its kind, the movement was the first to get into a large cultural conversation. Many of the players on the reactionary side (against the demand) would later become alt-right/alt-lite celebs.

    Another evident phenomenon is wellness culture, which focuses on self improvement and commoditises self care. It has the fandom and the ‘theology’ of purpose and meaning to back it. The philosophy of SoulCycle, Goop etc have their roots in New Thought, one of America’s earliest spiritual traditions that blended liberal Christianity with Transcendentalism, and the path includes folks like Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), and the discourse in the contemporary era even included self care as a revolutionary act against Trump’s America! The other phenomenon that the author brings up is the revival and rise of witchcraft. The number of adherents are over a million. Here too, Trump served as a nemesis, with the larger narrative connecting the rituals of witchcraft to a higher social and spiritual purpose – dismantling toxic and oppressive structures associated with patriarchy, white supremacy and other unjust hierarchies.

    Another massive shift is in social-sexual identities. Though swapping, kink etc existed in the 1900s, many interests and groups were in the closet are now lifestyles accepted by the mainstream. A key role was played by the internet in transforming the modes and rituals of these communities too, accelerating access and consumption. Simultaneously monogamy is receiving a pushback. The 1970s and 80s were the peak time for divorces in the US, that means children growing up then have a fairly dismal view of marriage.

    74% of American millennials now say that “whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know”. While fandom, wellness, witchcraft, sexual utopias all play out, are there organising thoughts that can take the place of religion? The author works out three of them. The first is ‘social justice culture’ – a progressive mix of self care, moral determination through lived experience, and a fight against racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry and injustice. The second is a Silicon Valley based version who work towards an optimised self. Libertarian techno-utopians, rewriting biology and society through ‘hacking’. Despite their cosmetic differences, both groups have much in common. They both have a disdain towards society’s mores, maxims and rules. And both seek self actualisation. And yes, both are viable consumer categories for capitalism. Wokeness, self care and more!

    However it is the third that the author considers the most viable contender, and the most dangerous. Authoritarian, reactionary, materialist, and one that valourises submission to a higher political or biological truth. They find spiritual and moral meaning in primal, masculine images of heroes past. Yes, mostly white. They believe that biological determinism, gender binary, and natural hierarchies are what leads to progress. Not progressivism and political correctness. Jordan Peterson is one of the high priests, and r/TheRedPill forum is an active shrine of the movement. They provide a sense of brotherhood. Meme magic in 4chan, Pepe and Kekism all were connected to the Donald Trump campaign. Many mass shootings and other acts of violence are by graduates of this school of thought.

    Religion and politics have been connected throughout history, but is remarkable to watch the narrative in the contemporary era unfold as the author connects the pieces and lights up the path that got us to where we are. But then again, to learn of something and to learn from something are two different things. In my favourite reads of 2023, and highly recommended if you have any interest in modern society and/or religion/ and/or culture.

    Notes
    1. In 1890, a businessman Elijah Bond patented a “talking board” for mass use. That’s the Ouija board.
    2. Apparently Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fan fiction – based on Twilight’s lead characters!

    Strange Rites