Commentary 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
Commentary 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,
Commentary 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
Commentary 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
Commentary 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
Commentary 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
Commentary 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