Category: Future & Tech

  • Heartificial Intelligence

    John C. Havens

    The title might seem like a bit of a corny wordplay, but I think you’d find it hard to come up with an alternative that best describes the premise of the book. Artificial Intelligence is slowly but surely becoming an inherent part of our lives, and I’d say that our situation is a bit like the ‘frog in boiling water’ scenario. That’s not to say that we will be ‘cooked’ but our sensitivity to the challenge is not really at the levels it should be at. Most of the discussions are around two themes – the extermination of our species by malevolent robots, and the increasing automation of jobs and the economic and societal repercussions. Both usually end up with polarising stances.

    One of the reasons I liked this book is that the author is not on either of the extremes – doomsday or paradise – his approach is very pragmatic. The first six chapters take the reader through the process of understanding the lay of the land – from describing how our happiness is slowly getting defined by tracking algorithms, and the complete lack of transparency and accountability in those who have access to this data, to the economics and purpose of a human life and how it’s changing, to the (seeming) limits of artificial intelligence, and finally the need to have an ethics/value system in place as we go faster in our journey of designing increasingly complex AI. (more…)

  • Homo Deus

    Yuval Noah Harari

    The follow up to Sapiens, and therefore it arrived with huge expectations. To begin with, while this is a progression from the earlier work, it is also a standalone work. The book has three parts which I would broadly classify as past, present and future. The author spends the first third of the book summarising what he wrote in Sapiens, and if you have read that book, especially recently, you might find yourself muttering “Why doesn’t he get on with it?” 🙂
    To be fair, he outlines his broad premise right at the beginning – having (relatively) conquered hunger, disease and war, humanity’s next agenda would be to master happiness, immortality and divinity. The path to that is what Yuval Noah Harari slowly but surely proceeds to elaborate on.

    The second part of the book is where Harari sets the premise and context for the future by analysing the present. As is his wont, he goes about dissecting the origins of our current belief systems and the occurrences that have led us to what he calls humanism, and our collective belief in man’s central role in the scheme of things. (more…)

  • Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

    Douglas Rushkoff

    At the beginning of the third chapter, the author asks us to imagine a world where there is only one operating system. In such a world, it would be difficult to imagine another OS, or even think of the OS as something that need not be the way it is. That, in a nutshell, is what money has become. “Central currency is the transactional tool that has overwhelmed business itself; money is the tail wagging the economy’s dog” because “money makes money faster than people or companies can create value”. The proof of it is in the abstractions that have come up in history – the stock exchange was an abstraction of commerce, and the derivatives market its further abstraction. The author notes how fitting it was when in 2013, a derivatives exchange had enough ‘value’ to buy the NYSE, its own creator of sorts!

    My introductory paragraph, and the title itself might give you the idea that this is some kind of a call for a bloody revolution against capitalism and technology. But it isn’t. The title is based on an incident in 2013 and in fact, the author notes how Google, using its buses, is actually doing its bit to protect the environment. He proceeds to ask “since when has doing the right thing become the wrong thing?” The buses, he argues, are soft targets, and the real culprit is a program that promotes growth above all else. So if the book is a call for revolution, it is against the concept of growth for growth’s sake, because such growth is the enemy of prosperity.  (more…)