WTF?

August 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.

August 15, 2017
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.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2017
Self-described technology evangelist O'Reilly poses an interesting question: Is there a way to acknowledge that technology is taking over our daily lives without being afraid of it? To put it another way: How are we to integrate new technologiesself-driving cars, for example, or robots that are so smart they are replacing humans in the workplacewithout feeling like we've lost control of our lives? Well, O'Reilly says, we're kind of doing that already. He cites numerous examples of technological breakthroughs that seemed ominous at first but now are taken for granted: Google Maps, the iPhone, even the Internet. The worrisome or frightening has become the humdrum, something whose sudden absence would be a major inconvenience to us. So, rather than feeling confused or scared by new technologies, we should embrace them; rather than search for ways to exclude them from our lives, we should be in search of a harmonious existence. For technophobes, this is a comforting and user-friendly book; for technophiles, a celebration of the tremendous potential of new tech.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)