Category: Non fiction

  • The Master Switch

    Tim Wu

    Wow!
    Two of my favourite books in the recent past have been The Moral Animal and The Sovereign Individual. I liked them because they brought out the fundamental patterns that underlie the evolution and behaviour of humans and the system of the world respectively. The Master Switch does the same with communication and information empires.

    His premise is this – history has shown that communication/information technologies follow a predictable path : it starts as an idea in a mind/group of minds typically in a small room, is then brought to life in the most rudimentary manner, and keeps itself open to improvements and changes until it becomes a solid proposition. It then shifts to industrial scale, predictable outputs, and controlled by a corporation which then decides to make it a closed system. He calls this the Cycle.

    The author’s contention is that all information businesses go through the cycle. The question he seeks to answer is “which is mightier : the radicalism of the Internet or the inevitability of the Cycle?” He gets there by taking us through the history of information empires.

    The story begins in the 1870s, when Alexander Graham Bell’s small telephone company goes up against the ruler of the times – Western Union. A classic underdog story that resulted in the continuing empire that is called AT&T. Is At&T still the hero? Will get to that in a bit. Similar stories with its own heroes and villains then play across radio (AM & FM), television, movies and now, the internet.

    It is not just the magnificent scope that makes the book interesting. The author retells history in the mould of a thriller! There are anecdotes and (not so) trivia that make the book really engaging. Multiple inventors of the same technology (and uncredited firsts), towering personalities from JP Morgan to Steve Jobs who left a firm imprint, fascinating origin stories of movie studios like Universal and Warner that are now household names and how movie making is now less to do with the movie and more to do with the business of the franchise (a movie is a 2 hour advertisement of an intellectual property which makes money through a franchise that sells everything from tshirts to DVDs to theme parks), companies that rise again like phoenixes in revenge arcs that span a century (GE buying Universal)!

    The author obviously does not give a definitive answer to whether the Internet will beat the Cycle. He suggests a constitutional approach (not regulatory) and a “Separations Principle” to make sure that the ownership of information creation, distribution (networks, infrastructure) and access control remains with different parties to prevent it from corporate or governmental misuse. The nuance he highlights is that the monopoly actually begins and even continues with noble intentions and utopian values, but loses the plot subsequently. Almost like “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” (Remember the question earlier about AT&T)
    He also points out (and this is where it meets The Sovereign Individual) that the user has the power to control how this plays out – “Habits shape markets far more powerfully than laws”.

    A fantastic read on multiple counts!

  • Against Empathy

    Paul Bloom

    As far as the title goes, he was preaching to the choir. My thoughts on empathy have been shaped over the last few years based on some excellent books like The Selfish Gene, The Moral Animal, Thinking Fast and Slow, Who’s in Charge? and even How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, which is quoted by the author quite a bit. These thoughts are not kind to empathy being the best guide for decision making of the moral or even sometimes the day to day kind. They also favour rational compassion. So, theoretically, this book should have worked for me, especially because it has been recommended by some of my favourite thinkers.

    But it didn’t to the extent that I had hoped it would. This, I think, is largely because the premise of “against empathy” required little validation for me, it was the case for rational compassion that I was more interested in. After all, disproving one thing is not always automatic proof for another, even if the “another” is part of the title of the book! Unfortunately, the book spends just spends the last 10 pages (of 241) on rational compassion. Or at best 25, if one extends a benefit of doubt to occasions where the author argues for it in related contexts.

    I did come across a few interesting things though. Some framing for example – how both folks for and against gun control/immigration are possibly driven by empathy. The only difference is who they are empathetic to. And quotes – this one being my favourite – “Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed” ~ Michael Ghiselin. (I really believe in this one, and the selfish interests that drives erm, selflessness) I realised that I was in the august company of Thomas Hobbes and Abraham Lincoln in this. There are also interesting concepts like the moralization gap – how we discriminate between the immorality of acts done to us and done by us (exaggerate the first, downplay the other).
    The arguments are a mixed bag, but the writing style is witty and accessible and I would recommend it to folks who are intrigued by the thought of being against empathy. If you’ve already arrived at it via thinking/reading, this could help you in validation, but only on the first part of the title.

  • The Rise of the Robots

    Martin Ford

    The bad news – it would seem that the robocracy is inevitable. The good news – this is a very well written book!
    In most robotics and AI narratives, what gets lost is the nuance as folks very firmly root themselves in polarising camps on the future of our species. The reason why this book worked for me was because its focus was less on the dramatic headline (what) and more on why it would happen. It is a very well researched book and sets about debunking popular schools of thought in a very clinical manner. The author is also wise enough to call out the things he is not sure of and mention alternate points of view, as well as objective enough to not fall for the hype of everything that’s new and supposedly disruptive.

    Though he does begin with the now ascertained fact that the first wave of automation will take away the routine and predictable jobs, he also warns that it won’t stop there. Even what we would call the higher end jobs will be safe only for a while longer. He is clear that this is a wave of disruption different from what we have seen before because the cognitive abilities that get developed will be replicable and scalable. He also demolishes a couple of currently popular coping mechanisms – consistent re-skilling, and man-machine collaboration.

    The second half of the book focuses on the economic and societal implications of the rise of the robots. He predicts the fall of middle class demand as well as economic mobility, as incomes stagnate or disappear completely, and warns that economic growth would not be sustainable since robots cannot be expected to be consumers, and the plutocracy (top 5% of the population) which has the money can only consume so much!

    The solution he believes in is some version of a universal income which would ensure the participation of a larger segment of the population and give some semblance of prosperity to everyone. But he also sees several challenges in execution.

    Beyond the broader narrative, there are some fascinating statistics and anecdotes – the development of Watson, the scarily increasing time it takes for employment to regain its original levels after a recession, the sale price of Internet behemoths (YouTube, Instagram, Whatsapp) framed as a cost/employee, and so on.

    While the outcomes may not really be palatable to anyone who belongs to the species, it doesn’t take away from what a fascinating read this is!

  • The Sovereign Individual

    James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

    One of my favourite books is The Moral Animal. It does a great job of explaining the connection between the mental organs and behaviour, and does justice to the explanatory line on its cover – “why we are the way we are”. I liked it a lot because it did a stellar job of helping me understand the reasons behind my mindset, relationships and interactions with the world at large. While that book helped me understand myself, this one helped me understand the world much better.

    Considering that it was published in 1997, this is as much a prediction machine as it is a brilliant book. It took at least till the middle of the last decade for even the internet to manifest itself in the form we are now familiar with. Therefore, accurately predicting the rise of e-commerce and cryptocurrency (referred to as cyber currency) is a feat in itself. The projections are not just in the field of business but cover social, economical, societal, political and even moral aspects as well. For instance, the rise of nationalism, filter bubbles, the twist in increasing income disparity (from between nations to within nations) because of lack of access are all themes that are being played out now. (more…)

  • Arrow of the Blue Skinned God

    Jonah Blank

    If you read the book solely for the connection to mythology, you might come away disappointed. It happened to me for most of the book until I framed it as a travelogue which happened to connect to the Ramayana and its principal characters in quite a few ways. In that frame, barring a couple of questionable occurrences, (“feni in Kerala” made me wonder whether calling Bruce Lee a cricketer was actually sarcasm) it does a wonderfully lucid job.

    The book was published in 1992 and it is always a pleasure to travel in time through books because, to quote the author, it “presents a picture of a certain place at a certain time, as seen by a certain person at a certain stage of his own life”. It is quite an interesting time to read this because 1992 was a landmark year for the powers that govern the country now. I’m referring to the demolition of the Babri Masjid. That’s where this journey starts.

    I think the problem was in my expectations. I thought this would be a linear journey – both in terms of the chronology of the events in the Ramayana, as well as in terms of covering the geography featured in the epic. It doesn’t work that way. While there are definitely quite a few interesting explorations of the geography, the book is more a study on the deep impact that the epic has even today in the life of an Indian. Not just at an individual level, but the societal, cultural, and political aspects as well.  (more…)