08/14/2017
“Everything is amazing, everything is horrible, and it’s all moving too fast,” writes O’Reilly, founder of a media company based in Silicon Valley, who describes himself as having spent most of his career thinking about the future. Here, he acknowledges that despite the amazing technological advances made in recent history, many people are trepidatious about the future, anticipating a dystopia in which robots have taken most human jobs. Who will save us from this coming to pass? It’s the creators of “unicorns,” posits O’Reilly—technologies that amaze, and then become quotidian, freeing people to pursue more creative work. Examples of unicorns, according to O’Reilly, include the automobile, the telephone, and, more recently, the iPhone and peer-to-peer services such as Lyft and Uber. To O’Reilly, these radical innovations arise more out of intellectual curiosity than avarice—though he doesn’t make clear why this distinction matters. In his somewhat dreamy-eyed, utopian view of the future world, machine productivity will provide everyone’s basic needs and humans will find new jobs that consist of nurturing and enriching each other’s lives. The ideas are interesting but their presentation is long-winded. Nonetheless, O’Reilly has delivered an interesting, if somewhat breathless, look at what the future might hold. (Oct.)
the act of reading WTF clarified certain foggy notions with which I’ve been wrestling, distilling them into more concise reckonings….O’Reilly’s book has a way of nudging things into the light: He takes sincere offense with the way our tech-driven capitalistic system has developed, and spends a lot of his book laying out a case for why we have to change our approach to how we run our companies and our governments.” — John Battelle, NewCo Shift
“Tim O’Reilly’s creative insights and moral clarity have made him the trusted guide to waves of technology now sweeping the planet. If you want a better future, don’t just read this book, but make sure your friends do, too.” — Erik Brynjolfsson, Director MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and Co-author of The Second Machine Age
“For anyone who wants to know how to prepare for the future – and how we might shape that future in ways that broadly benefit society, not just technological or entrepreneurial elites—WTF? is an indispensable guide.” — Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age
“O’Reilly has an uncanny knack for charting what’s ahead. In WTF?, he shows us know he does it. At a time of sweeping change, it is a bracing and an exhilarating read.” — Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America
“So many insights, so much history, so much of our future by the consummate insider who is as much a part of the story as the people and ideas he writes about - I was learning something on more or less every page.” — Dr. James Manyika, director, McKinsey Global Institute
“Tim has been an astute observer of both the successes and the excesses of Silicon Valley. This provocative book distills the lessons he has learned about the power of technology to shape our economy and our lives.” — Hal Varian, Google chief economist
“No one is better at understanding the future than Tim O’Reilly. He has an intuitive feel and a deep knowledge of technology. This book makes sense of the astonishing transformations that are happening around us and is an indispensable guidebook to tomorrow.” — Walter Isaacson, President & CEO, The Aspen Institute
“[a] punchy and provocative book… What’s the Future is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society… a jaunty read with a compelling narrative of how technology interweaves with the real world. If it can cajole even a few tech titans to dwell on the social and political impact of what they do then it will have served a useful purpose.” — Financial Times
“WTF? is a book about technology as it was, as it is, and as it could be. It is told from the perspective of someone who has been personally present at the most important moments in the fast-paced history of tech, and who played a significant role in those moments. It’s a rare and important piece of criticism that inspires even as it dissects. Please do read this book.” — Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
WTF? is a book about technology as it was, as it is, and as it could be. It is told from the perspective of someone who has been personally present at the most important moments in the fast-paced history of tech, and who played a significant role in those moments. It’s a rare and important piece of criticism that inspires even as it dissects. Please do read this book.
Tim O’Reilly’s creative insights and moral clarity have made him the trusted guide to waves of technology now sweeping the planet. If you want a better future, don’t just read this book, but make sure your friends do, too.
the act of reading WTF clarified certain foggy notions with which I’ve been wrestling, distilling them into more concise reckonings….O’Reilly’s book has a way of nudging things into the light: He takes sincere offense with the way our tech-driven capitalistic system has developed, and spends a lot of his book laying out a case for why we have to change our approach to how we run our companies and our governments.
So many insights, so much history, so much of our future by the consummate insider who is as much a part of the story as the people and ideas he writes about - I was learning something on more or less every page.
O’Reilly has an uncanny knack for charting what’s ahead. In WTF?, he shows us know he does it. At a time of sweeping change, it is a bracing and an exhilarating read.
[a] punchy and provocative book… What’s the Future is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society… a jaunty read with a compelling narrative of how technology interweaves with the real world. If it can cajole even a few tech titans to dwell on the social and political impact of what they do then it will have served a useful purpose.
Tim has been an astute observer of both the successes and the excesses of Silicon Valley. This provocative book distills the lessons he has learned about the power of technology to shape our economy and our lives.
For anyone who wants to know how to prepare for the future – and how we might shape that future in ways that broadly benefit society, not just technological or entrepreneurial elites—WTF? is an indispensable guide.
No one is better at understanding the future than Tim O’Reilly. He has an intuitive feel and a deep knowledge of technology. This book makes sense of the astonishing transformations that are happening around us and is an indispensable guidebook to tomorrow.
[a] punchy and provocative book… What’s the Future is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society… a jaunty read with a compelling narrative of how technology interweaves with the real world. If it can cajole even a few tech titans to dwell on the social and political impact of what they do then it will have served a useful purpose.
2017-08-07
A good-news, bad-news look at a world full of unicorns, robots, and wonder—the future, in other words, as seen by longtime innovation watcher O'Reilly."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," the great British futurist and sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed. Thus the rude but now commonplace acronym of media maven and venture capitalist O'Reilly's book: "The world today is full of things that once made us say ‘WTF?' but are already well on their way to being the stuff of daily life." One such innovation was the LINUX operating system, a decentralized creation essentially given away for free, just as was the World Wide Web, and never mind all the people trying to monetize both, the source of exasperated cries of WTF on the part of techno-libertarians. There's magic, there's WTFery, and there are unicorns—the latter things like Siri and kindred bits of artificial intelligence that fulfill O'Reilly's requirements that they change the world while seeming at first impossible. (And how did we ever live without our iPhones, anyway?) The rub in all this, of course, is that people are being left behind in this glamorous future, a place of "thick marketplaces" and endless churn. It is on these matters that O'Reilly turns serious, if a trifle dreamy: "The future depends on what we choose," he intones. As such, it offers us chances to do such things as rethink government and how it delivers services, reconceive money and its place in our lives ("Money is like gas in the car—you need to pay attention or you'll end up on the side of the road—but a successful business or a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations"), and so forth. The argument gets a little scattershot, but understandably, since the future is a big subject and the choices many. O'Reilly's vision is more Utopian than dystopian, even downright optimistic in a roundabout, creative-destruction sort of way. The positive outlook is refreshing and engaging.
