WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us
That’s the title of my new book, due out on October 10 from Harper Business in the US, and on October 17 from Penguin Random House in the UK. The book won’t be on sale till October 10, but you can pre-order on Amazon now!
WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of dismay. In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame.
In the book, I share some of the techniques we’ve used at O’Reilly Media to make sense of and predict past innovation waves such as the commercialization of the internet, open source software, the internet as a platform, big data, open government, and the maker movement. I apply those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today’s world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. I give tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.
The book is a combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action. It covers the lessons that I’ve learned about technology platforms from four decades in the industry, and how they apply both to businesses and to the broader economy.
The core of the call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. I say, “Only if that’s what we ask them to do!” I’ve had my fill of technological determinism. Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems. Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how we can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one?
One of the major threads in the book is how the tech economy is increasingly dominated by platforms. Whether it’s Uber or Airbnb (the companies du jour) or Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Twitter, or financial markets, these platforms must create a “thick marketplace” of producers and consumers. When they try to extract too much value for the platform owner, they ultimately fail. (I first observed this pattern in the PC software ecosystem, and ever since have been warning internet companies against making the same mistakes Microsoft did.) Platforms must create more value than they capture if their ecosystem is to survive.
If a platform fails to create a sustainable ecosystem, entrepreneurs look elsewhere, and the platform loses its vitality. This is true for nations and economies as well.
In addition, we see that platforms are increasingly managed by algorithms, and that these algorithms always have a “fitness function,” the thing they are relentlessly optimizing for. Despite their seeming intelligence, algorithmic systems do exactly what we tell them to do, with unintended and sometimes frightening results. We have to be extremely careful what we ask for.
Uber optimizes for passenger pickup time, Google optimizes for relevance (in both search results and in ads), Facebook optimizes for engagement (and we see how that went wrong with fake news). What do our financial markets optimize for? That leads me to an account of financial markets as the first rogue AI, hostile to humanity. Income inequality, declining upward mobility, and job losses due to technology are not inevitable; they are the result of design choices we have made in the algorithms that manage our markets.
Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. I say, “Only if that’s what we ask them to do!”
I’m optimistic, though. There is plenty of work to be done, and plenty of uncompensated or poorly-compensated work (in caring and creativity and education) already being done, which can be the basis of a 21st century economy even as technology replaces many of the jobs we do today.
The fundamental design pattern of success with technology is to enable people to do things that were previously impossible. Companies that only use technology to do less by getting rid of people will be surpassed by those who use it to help them to do more. Companies must commit themselves to continuously educating and empowering people with the tools of the future, not just treating them as a cost to be reduced.
The great unanswered question is why technology is so often being used to eliminate jobs and to make a small segment of society ever richer rather than being used to do more, to solve the great problems we face today and to make society as a whole prosperous. I make the case that the answer is in the fitness function we have given to our economic algorithms, and the unexamined rules we use to guide our economy. Just as Google constantly updates its algorithms in pursuit of relevant search and ad results, and as Facebook wrestles with how to rethink its algorithms for user engagement in response to fake news, we must now rewrite the algorithms that shape our economy if we want our society to prosper in the age of the brilliant technologies of the 21st century, and use them to create a more human-centered future.
Here are some of the things that have already been said about the book. I’m blushing. I hope that the praise is justified, and that you find the book as stimulating as my advance readers have done.
But more than that, I hope that the ideas in this book teach and inspire a generation of entrepreneurs to build lasting companies with real impact, to work on stuff that matters, and to commit themselves to making a richer and more equitable world for all.
The book won’t be on sale till October 10, but you can pre-order on Amazon now!
