paulsaletan.com

paulsaletan.com

Book Review: Kasparov's Deep Thinking

Book Review: Kasparov's Deep Thinking

Is AI our enemy? Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov answers that question through Deep Thinking. It's a fascinating record of how chess machine programming has evolved over decades, from a concept by Alan Turing to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer that finally defeated the grandmaster. Millenials should take notice. They

Book Review: World Without Mind

Book Review: World Without Mind

Franklin Foer's World Without Mind bears an ominous sub-title: "The Existential Threat of Big Tech". Unfortunately, the book doesn't deliver on its broad promise. A more accurate title would have been, "How Amazon and the Free Web Are Destroying Journalism". That's the area Foer understands well, from his career as

Social Media and the Wisdom of Crowds

Social Media and the Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, has been influential in financial markets and corporate transformations. It also has plenty of ideas relevant to social networking's future. The book's leading concept is that that collective intelligence -- aggregating diverse opinions -- can out-perform judgments made by alleged experts

You Are Not a Gadget

You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is a broad criticism of the internet. Lanier thinks cyberspace is full of unimaginative software. Web 2.0 is window dressing on a tired paradigm. Silicon Valley is funding trivial applications.not much better than than the hasty business plans

The Long Tail Revisited

The Long Tail Revisited

I've been reading The Long Tail, the 2006 blockbuster extolling the unlimited consumer choice made possible by the internet. The book was written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Its title is now part of the marketing lexicon, and aptly captures the author's thesis: there's a lot of money

Rework: How To Succeed in Business Without Really Growing

Rework: How To Succeed in Business Without Really Growing

Rework is as much a manifesto as a business guide. The content is less bombastic than some of its advance publicity, but be prepared for a polemic. Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of Ruby on Rails) argue why you should keep your company's size and products

The HSA Model For Health Care Reform

The HSA Model For Health Care Reform

I've previously given arguments why the private insurance industry is not worth preserving and how nationalized health care would boost the economy. But even if legislation passes, there's a justifiable fear that health care reform will fail -- by making too many compromises, or by escalating costs even further. There's

Why National Health Care is Good for the Economy

Why National Health Care is Good for the Economy

My last post about the failure of private health insurance was prompted by a conversation with a friend. Both of us are baby boomers, at that life-stage where we and our spouses work as much to secure affordable group health insurance as for the wages. Neither of our families has

No Defending Private Health Insurance

No Defending Private Health Insurance

I was talking with a friend recently about health care reform and how it has divided the public. Both of us understand the concerns about government control. However, we can't understand how our country could do worse than the private insurance "system". As my friend put it, private insurers "add