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WORK TITLE: WTF?
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/6/1954
WEBSITE: http://www.oreilly.com
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: Irish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 6, 1954, in Ireland.
EDUCATION:Harvard College, B.A. (cum laude), 1975.
ADDRESS
CAREER
O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA, founder and CEO. 1978–. O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, partner. Serves on boards of Maker Media, Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, has been called a technology guru. Born in Ireland and brought up in San Francisco, he started his business as a publisher of technical manuals in the 1970s. He has since ventured into publishing online content and investing in a variety of other businesses. He “is one of the most influential pioneers and thinkers of the internet age” and “has been early to spot many influential tech trends … open-source software, web 2.0, wifi, the maker movement and big data among them,” Tim Lewis wrote in a London Observer profile.
O’Reilly’s enthusiasm for technology is evident in his book WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. People should embrace technology and not fear it, he asserts. “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,” he writes, citing among them the World Wide Web, smartphones, Google Maps, and more. Because of that, further innovations such as self-driving cars should be viewed as beneficial, not threatening, he says. Technology will also probably mean new ways of exchanging money and performing jobs, and becoming accustomed to these will require some changes in attitude but will ultimately mean greater degrees of freedom and convenience, according to O’Reilly. Humans, however, can and should remain in control, he says. On a Recode Decode podcast interview, he told Kara Swisher: “‘WTF’ is an expression, either of amazement or dismay. And technology can give us both; in fact, it often is. I’m saying, ‘What’s the future? It can be the WTF of amazement or the WTF of dismay, and it’s up to us to decide which one we want.’”
In the interview with Lewis, he noted: “I’m ultimately trying to get to this notion that technology is going to eliminate jobs and my response is: only if that’s what we tell it to do. And it is what we’re telling it to do. … We have to fix the algorithm that we’re using to manage our markets and our economy.” Technology, he continued, may replace human workers in the short term, but if used properly, it can create more jobs in the long term. “Recently, Amazon introduced 50,000 robots but also added 200,000 people because they used them to pack more products into the warehouses,” he told Lewis. “They used them to speed up delivery times. This is the narrative of the augmented worker, which again is a pattern from history.”
Several reviewers saw much of value in O’Reilly’s book. “Part memoir and part forward-leaning manifesto, it’s full of contrarian insights and fresh lenses for framing tech’s ever-baffling trajectory,” Rob Reid observed on the Arstechnica Web site. “All is backed up with data, facts, and first-hand reports from Tim’s decades on the front lines. And it’s steeped in a level-headed positivity that elegantly rebuts the sudden knee-jerk pessimism of a community that (let’s face it) has it pretty good, compared to most humans across history.” In Booklist, David Pitt remarked that O’Reilly’s work will be “comforting and user-friendly” to those who fear technology’s power, and for technology enthusiasts, it will be “a celebration of the tremendous potential of new tech.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor thought that while “the argument gets a little scattershot,” O’Reilly’s “positive outlook is refreshing and engaging.” A Publishers Weekly commentator maintained that the author’s “presentation is long-winded,” but allowed that WTF? is “an interesting, if somewhat breathless, look at what the future might hold.”
Molly Sauter, reviewing at the Outline Web site, voiced more serious reservations. She described the book as “a memoir/business text/techno-utopian polemic that gestures at a revolutionary future while endorsing existing Silicon Valley systems and excusing their part in creating economic and social strife.” In her opinion, he shows little sympathy for those displaced by technology. Commenting on a passage about applications of technology by “new generation of users,” she wrote: “Tim O’Reilly sees this ‘new generation of users’ as baby boomers who were part of the counterculture movement in the 1960s but who now enjoy enough financial success to drop $150 to $200 on dinner for two in Oakland. As far as this book goes, he simply doesn’t see anyone else.”
Others, though, noted his call for new ways of thinking about economics so that technology benefits all. “O’Reilly argues that our financial markets are currently operating just like the runaway [artificial intelligence] we most fear, incentivising corporate bosses to do bad things and destroy society,” John Thornhill reported in the Financial Times. The book, he continued, “is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society.” He found O’Reilly “rather Pollyanna-ish about the prospects of technology creating and augmenting jobs, rather than destroying them,” but nonetheless dubbed WTF? “a jaunty read with a compelling narrative” that might cause some tech executives “to dwell on the social and political impact of what they do.” Reid added that O’Reilly brings “empathy and optimism” to his discussion of the impact of technology. “Not the blind optimism of the naïve,” Reid explained. “Not the self-serving optimism of the wealthy libertarian. But the fact-based optimism of a thoughtful technologist who is, at bottom, a realist.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, David Pitt, review of WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, p. 22.
Financial Times, November 13, 2017, John Thornhill, review of WTF?
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of WTF?
Observer (London, England), October 22, 2017, Tim Lewis, interview with Tim O’Reilly.
Publishers Weekly, August 14, 2017, review of WTF?, p. 70.
ONLINE
Arstechnica, https://arstechnica.com/ (October 10, 2017), Rob Reid, “Tim O’Reilly on Why the Future Probably Won’t Be All That Terrible.”
Aspen Ideas Festival Website, https://www.aspenideas.org/ (May 15, 2018), brief biography.
Evonomics, http://evonomics.com/ (May 16, 2018). “Tim O’Reilly: It’s Time to Rewrite the Rules of Our Economy.”
O’Reilly Media Website, http://www.oreilly.com/ (May 15, 2018), brief biography.
Outline, https://theoutline.com (October 23, 2017), Molly Sauter, review of WTF?
Recode, https://www.recode.net/ (October 18, 2017), Eric Johnson,”‘WTF?’ Author Tim O’Reilly Says Tech and Business Elites Are Setting the World up for ‘War and Revolution’” (summary of Kara Swisher Recode Decode podcast interview with Tim O’Reilly).
TED Website, https://www.tedmed.com/ (May 15, 2018), brief biography.
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. His original business plan was simply “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. O’Reilly Media delivers online learning, publishes books, runs conferences, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators.
Tim has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. In 1993, he launched the first commercial, ad-supported site on the internet. In 1998, he organized the meeting where the term “open source software” was agreed on, and helped the business world understand its importance. In 2004, with the Web 2.0 Summit, he defined how “Web 2.0” represented not only the resurgence of the web after the dot com bust, but a new model for the computer industry, based on big data, collective intelligence, and the internet as a platform. In 2009, with his “Gov 2.0 Summit,” he framed a conversation about the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawned initiatives at the Federal, State, and local level, and around the world. He has now turned his attention to implications of AI, the on-demand economy, and other technologies that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world. This is the subject of his forthcoming book from Harper Business, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us.
Quoted in Sidelights: “is one of the most influential pioneers and thinkers of the internet age” and “has been early to spot many influential tech trends … open-source software, web 2.0, wifi, the maker movement and big data among them,”
“I’m ultimately trying to get to this notion that technology is going to eliminate jobs and my response is: only if that’s what we tell it to do. And it is what we’re telling it to do. … We have to fix the algorithm that we’re using to manage our markets and our economy.” Technology, he continued, may replace human workers in the short term, but if used properly, it can create more jobs in the long term. “Recently, Amazon introduced 50,000 robots but also added 200,000 people because they used them to pack more products into the warehouses,” he told Lewis. “They used them to speed up delivery times. This is the narrative of the augmented worker, which again is a pattern from history.”
Interview
Tim O’Reilly: ‘Generosity is the thing that is at the beginning of prosperity’
By Tim Lewis
The tech pioneer, CEO of publishing company O’Reilly Media, says his industry will fail unless the web giants start putting consumers ahead of shareholders
Tim Lewis
Sun 22 Oct 2017 10.00 BST Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 23.49 GMT
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CEO Tim O’Reilly
CEO Tim O’Reilly: a great admirer of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Photograph: Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for LinkedIn
Tim O’Reilly believes we need to have a reset. This means more coming from him than it does from most people. The 63-year-old CEO, born in Ireland and raised in San Francisco, is one of the most influential pioneers and thinkers of the internet age. His publishing company, O’Reilly Media, began producing computer manuals in the late 1970s and he has been early to spot many influential tech trends ever since: open-source software, web 2.0, wifi, the maker movement and big data among them.
His new book, WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, looks at work and how jobs will change in a world shaped by technology. It is sometimes hard not to be pessimistic about what’s coming over the hill, but he is convinced that our destiny remains in human hands.
How would you describe your new book?
It’s very complex. It’s an economic call to action wrapped in a business book wrapped in a memoir. Ha!
You studied classics at Harvard and have been involved in the tech revolution since the very beginning…
It could have been 10 books. But the start point was a talk at TED University on income inequality by Nick Hanauer in 2012. He made this point that is too often not appreciated, which is that the whole cycle of capitalism depends on people being able to buy things. And with the short-sighted approach to capitalism, in which the rich get richer and it doesn’t trickle down, we’re getting to an endgame of that.
That idea played into a set of observations I had been making my whole career. Namely, the rise and fall of technology platforms has lessons for the rise and fall of society. When those platforms create value for the participants, they flourish. When they start taking too much of the value for themselves, they fail.
What’s an example of that?
At the very beginning of my career, it was the battle between IBM and the tech industry. Then Microsoft and the tech industry. Microsoft was the liberator originally: the PC was part of the first revolution, a democratising force. Then Microsoft recreated the old monopoly of IBM, where they sucked all the air out of the room. And sure enough all of the customers went somewhere else.
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And that continues to happen?
In the book, I write about how Google optimises for relevance and how that works. Facebook is trying to optimise for something slightly different: something that will be clicked on or that people will find engaging and spend more time with. And we’ve seen it with fake news and now ad targeting, how Facebook’s well-intentioned, incredibly idealistic algorithms have become increasingly divisive.
How does that connect to the wider economy?
I’m ultimately trying to get to this notion that technology is going to eliminate jobs and my response is: only if that’s what we tell it to do. And it is what we’re telling it to do. Because the goal, just like Google has relevance and Facebook has engagement, the massive goal that we tell every company to pursue is shareholder value. Value for shareholders, even if it means shedding employees, gutting communities, doing things that are bad in the long run, because we’ve created all these incentives and there are people who are gaming the system.
In the same way, fake news shows that Facebook didn’t get it quite right and had to fix the algorithm; we have to fix the algorithm that we’re using to manage our markets and our economy.
Robots 'could take 4m UK private sector jobs within 10 years'
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You mention the idealistic streak that some of these big tech companies have. Does that make you optimistic that change can happen?
Yes, but they need to step up and understand what it means to practise that ideal. For Google to say: “Don’t be evil” and then do some of the things that they do; well, guys, you’ve got to think a little harder about that. It’s funny because the company that I’ve ended up respecting the most in that regard is Amazon. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not great about Amazon, but they keep upping the ante in ways that are interesting and productive. And I’m a great admirer of Elon Musk. I’d say that he and Jeff Bezos are my two favourite entrepreneurs at the moment.
You’ve not always praised Amazon. What’s changed?
Well, it’s the fact that they are consistently bold in their reinvestment in the future. Again, if you look at Google, they go: “We’ve got all these big bets…” But a lot of them feel like rich people’s toys: “We’re going to work on having people live for ever” or whatever. It’s like, OK, great. But Amazon: think about how many companies exist and are supported by Amazon’s cloud computing platform. They invented this whole new category. And they are always pushing for lower prices, not for higher margins. I just feel that Jeff is committed to the future in a way that a lot of people aren’t.
Generosity is the thing that is at the beginning of prosperity, not at the end
Tim O'Reilly
One of the central themes of the book is AI and what impact it will have on the job market. Again, you suggest that Amazon is leading the way here…
Recently, Amazon introduced 50,000 robots but also added 200,000 people because they used them to pack more products into the warehouses. They used them to speed up delivery times. This is the narrative of the augmented worker, which again is a pattern from history. A steam shovel could do more than any human worker and, yes, it did mean that we put a lot of human workers out of business. But then we started doing more and that put people back to work.
Just in my neighbourhood, the US Post Office, which everyone thought was on its deathbed, is now showing up at 10pm. Crazy stuff! But that’s because Amazon upped the ante. Or Uber: it’s a revolution in urban transportation that, because of the augmentation of mapping and directions, has put millions of untrained people to work. That’s the equivalent of the steam shovel.
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Looking back at your career, what are you proudest of?
I’m really proud of the role I played in reshaping the narrative about open-source software. It was seen as this business-hostile thing: free software. But I saw it as a huge flowering of opportunity that’s open to the world. I guess if you look at my entire career, I’m trying to talk about the value of generosity. And why generosity is not something you paste on at the end – generosity is something that is generative. Generosity is the thing that is at the beginning of prosperity, not at the end.
But is that human nature?
It’s all human nature, it’s interesting. I’ve just lately been reading a book I highly recommend: How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life by Russ Roberts. And it’s funny because I expected it to be a libertarian account of why free markets are so great. But it’s about Adam Smith’s other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and about the desire of people to be good and the desire of people to be seen as good by their peers. And how that’s the root thing in human behaviour. In a lot of ways, I’ve spent my career trying to talk about what is good – maybe that’s my classics training – in the realm of technology.
So what’s the role of the entrepreneur within this system?
Before steel girders, we couldn’t build skyscrapers. Before steel cables, we couldn’t build suspension bridges. We keep advancing, these new technologies make new things possible, and as a result we become richer. So, technology entrepreneurs, that’s your job! To find the things that were previously impossible.
• WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us by Tim O’Reilly is published by Random House (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Topics
Tim O’Reilly
tim@oreilly.com @timoreilly fb.com/timoreilly linkedin.com/in/timo3 slideshare.net/timoreilly
I’ve started to have trouble tracking down my various, scattered writings and interviews on the Net myself, so I decided to create a page where I can find my own words when I want to refer to them. I figured some other people might want to look at this archive as well. In addition, here is my official bio and my short official bio.
WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us - by Tim O'Reilly
My book on technology and the future of the economy
In WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us (Harper Business, October 2017), I share some of the techniques we’ve used at O’Reilly Media to make sense of and predict innovation waves such as open source, web services and the internet as platform, and the maker movement. I apply those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how technologies such as 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.
The book is a combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action. I draw on lessons from Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and Lyft to show how those platforms prosper only when they create more value for their participants than they extract for the platform owner. I also explore how, like those platforms, our economy and financial markets have become increasingly managed by algorithms, and how we must rewrite those algorithms if we wish to create a more human-centered future.
I draw business lessons about the rules for success in "the Next Economy" that can come after our current WTF economy. 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.
Read the book on Safari. Now available at Amazon and booksellers everywhere.
Recent interviews, articles, and talks
WTF? By Tim O'Reilly (October 2017). The folks at Harper Business created this short video with me to promote the launch of my book. Let me know what you think!
Tim O’Reilly: ‘WTF’ does not stand for ‘What the future.’ A conversation with the founder of O’Reilly Media on how we can take back control of our technology and our lives. (PC magazine, March 2018).
During SXSW, Tim spoke with Dan Costa, PC magazine editor in chief, SVP for content at Ziff-Davis, and host of the Fast Forward podcast. The two tech veterans discussed the genesis of Tim’s book, the reasons Tim remains optimistic about human progress, the problems of wage stagnation and income inequality, the importance of improving marketplace algorithms, the folly of pursuing shareholder value and neglecting the welfare of employees, and more.
Watch the interview and read a quick summary here.
Tim O’Reilly to tech companies: Use AI to do more than cut costs (VentureBeat’s BLUEPRINT forum, March 2018).
“O’Reilly thinks that the way tech companies currently think about automation is problematic. They focus on using AI to reduce costs—which often translates to eliminating jobs. Instead, tech companies need to think about using AI to make those jobs better. Getting companies to think about using AI to do more than improve their bottom line isn’t just the responsibility of individual companies—it will require an overhaul of the current economic system, said O’Reilly.”
Watch the presentation and read a brief summary here.
Tim O’Reilly on Managing in the Age of Algorithms (Interview with Massimo Portincaso of BCG, February 2018).
“We have to think things that are unthinkable. We have to actually understand that perhaps the current structure of our entire economy—the current structure of our companies—is being challenged. We have to think new things.”
Watch the interview or read the highlights here.
Tim O’Reilly eyes the future of the tech industry by peering into the past (Fast Company, February 2018).
Lots of folks have expressed amazement at the speed with which Facebook, Google, and Apple have gone from being at the center of “the coolest industry” around to being likened to Big Tobacco, “peddling a destructive addiction,” as New York Times columnist David Brooks has characterized the shift. Count Tim O’Reilly among those who’ve been decidedly less surprised. “It’s something that happens in the life of every technology,” O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, told me … “Television was going to change the world for the better. And then we had this backlash where we said, ‘Oh no, it’s making everybody into couch potatoes and making everybody stupid.’ The automobile was going to change the world for the better—and it did. And then we realized, oh my gosh, there are all these terrible downsides.… It’s kind of how we progress as a species.”
Read the story and listen to the Bottom Line podcast here.
An optimist's guide to a future run by machines (Quartz, December 2017).
"In his new book WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, published by Penguin Random House in October, the tech thinker and writer envisions a future in which people, particularly tech and financial executives, make smart, conscientious decisions to harness technology for good…. With the right choices, machines doesn't have to put humans out of jobs. Rather, they could create work—and joy—for us. O'Reilly is keen to stress this ideal future, where AI brings us unimaginable delights and higher standards of livings, can only be achieved if we radically change how we view our economy and capitalist system."
Read the interview here.
Tim O'Reilly says technology too profit-focused (KQED Forum, December 2017).
"Longtime tech insider Tim O'Reilly calls his new book an economic call to action wrapped in a business book wrapped in a memoir. Titled WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, the book argues that technological innovation can only drive positive economic and social change if the public demands prosperity for all."
Listen to the interview here.
Brian Rose interviews Tim O'Reilly (London Real, December 2017).
This far-reaching discussion includes what we can learn from watching the peripheral alpha geeks, envisioning the world of tomorrow by observing today's seemingly small indicators, the role of government in technological breakthroughs, business ethics, secrets, and lessons learned from going through the dot-com crash, the importance of generosity, and reflections on iconic tech industry leaders.
Watch the discussion here. (Access to the video is free, though you will need to register on the site.)
Predicting the future with Silicon Valley "oracle" Tim O'Reilly: The tech veteran has been ahead of the curve for 30 years. Here's how he does it (Management Today, December 2017).
"The traditional narrative now is that innovation is all entrepreneurs and VCs—that really misses the point. Innovation often comes in markets that people don't expect, starting with people who are enthusiasts. I always pay attention to those kinds of people."
"Of the great entrepreneurs I know, there are some who were seriously intent on becoming entrepreneurs—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos. But Larry [Page] and Sergiy [Brin] were just trying to do something interesting. We under-rate the accidental entrepreneur, who makes something happen because they love what they do and think there's a problem worth solving. Google's greatest achievements were when they were motivated by access to all of the worldâs information."
Read the complete interview.
Tim O'Reilly on What's The Future (WTF?) (Future2 podcast, December 2017).
Topics discussed:
The Book: Whatâs the Future and Why Itâs Up to Us
Whether companies like Amazon and Facebook are capturing more value than theyâre creating and are they becoming dangerously monopolistic
Why traditional maps of the world such as financial statements and short-term shareholder value need to be revisited
What Tim thinks about the FCC winding back net neutrality
What businesses need to think about to map out their business model for the next economy
Will technology take our jobs?
AI and its impact on humanity
Government 2.0
Listen to the podcast here.
Can a society ruled by complex computer algorithms let new ideas in? (Jim Daly's analysis of Tim O'Reilly's appearance Reinvent's What's Now: San Francisco, November 2017).
O'Reilly asks a simple question, not just about the platform economy, but about any new or powerful technology: "Will it help us build the kind of society we want to live in?"
Read the commentary and watch the accompanying video clips here. A video of the complete Reinvent discussion is available here.
Tim O'Reilly—The Trend Spotter (The Tim Ferriss Show, November 2017).
"Money is like gas during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations."
Listen to the podcast here.
Robot workers will improve everyone's lives, not just the rich, according to Tim O'Reilly (Business Insider, November 2017).
"What do rich people do today? First off, they have great education with small class sizes, intensive teaching, they have concierge medicine. They have incredible opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the good life. Why wouldn't we want that for everybody? If we had the machines doing more of the work we could all live like rich people and that I think is kind of the vision."
Watch the video or read the transcript here.
People power, not robots, will overcome humanity's challenges (Financial Times, October 2017).
"We are in the thrall of an economic theory that says that wages and working conditions are entirely subject to inevitable laws of supply and demand, not recognising the rules and incentives we have created that ruthlessly allocate the benefit of increased productivity to the owners of capital and to consumers in the form of lower prices, but dictate that human workers are a cost to be eliminated. Judged by the hollowing out of modern economies, there is something wrong with that theory."
Read the article and listen to the audio clip here.
Tim O'Reilly says the economy is running on the wrong algorithm (Wired, October 2017).
We've got the economy running on the wrong algorithm. That's according to Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media and Silicon Valley's favourite futurist, who argues that optimisation for corporate profits above all else—and often at the cost of jobs—is becoming untenable. "We've forgotten that if we donât pay people, they can't buy our products; they can't respond to our ads," he says. "So there's a problem with the algorithm that weâre using to run modern businesses."
Tim O'Reilly: 'Generosity is the thing that is at the beginning of prosperity' (Interview in The Guardian, October 2017).
Tim O'Reilly believes we need to have a reset. This means more coming from him than it does from most people. The 63-year-old CEO, born in Ireland and raised in San Francisco, is one of the most influential pioneers and thinkers of the internet age. His publishing company, O'Reilly Media, began producing computer manuals in the late 1970s and he has been early to spot many influential tech trends ever since: open-source software, web 2.0, wifi, the maker movement and big data among them. His new book, WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, looks at work and how jobs will change in a world shaped by technology. It is sometimes hard not to be pessimistic about what's coming over the hill, but he is convinced that our destiny remains in human hands.
Read the interview here.
If Facebook makes you mad, it could be what you're clicking (CNN Tech, October 2017).
"Tech entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly tells CNN Tech's Laurie Segall why we're responsible for letting machines replace people in the workforce and how we have the power to fix it."
Re-evaluating the economics of tech (Marketplace, October 2017).
"I could see coming years ago that people were increasingly afraid of technology. And optimism about the future has been a huge, driving positive force in the economy. And once we become afraid of technology, we become afraid of progress. Bad things happen. And I feel that the tech industry deserves some of the blame for that. Because all we've been talking about is disruption—what we're going to destroy. And the kinds of values that are often espoused by the tech industry really are an anathema to the main street economy in which many people live."
Listen to the complete interview by Marketplace Tech's Molly Wood.
Tech entrepreneur asks "WTF? What's the future?" (The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, October 2017).
"I'm really sick and tired of hearing that the robots are going to take our jobs. They're only going to do that if that's what we tell them to do. And a lot of what we have to think about is: how are we telling them that? Why are we telling them that? And what do we do about it?"
"WTF?" author Tim O'Reilly says tech and business elites are setting the world up for "war and revolution" (Recode Decode podcast with Kara Swisher, October 2017).
"O'Reilly fears that today's prevailing philosophy of elevating profit above all other goals is setting the entire economy down a dangerous path. When Wall Street's priorities come before society's, he said, the financial markets become a 'rogue AI,' making choices that are ultimately bad for us."
Listen to the podcast here
Tim O'Reilly on why the future probably won't be all that terrible: Economies as AI, humans as gut bacteria for tech, and how the Luddites got it wrong (Ars Technica, October 2017).
"Tim foresees smooth sailing if society can better provide for those being left behind. In this, he cites the bogeymen of all tech optimists, the Luddites. But he suffuses his discussion of them with both empathy and optimism. Not the blind optimism of the naïve. Not the self-serving optimism of the wealthy libertarian. But the fact-based optimism of a thoughtful technologist who is, at bottom, a realist."
Read Rob Reid's article here.
Listen to Rob's After On podcast to to hear his complete interview with Tim.
Algorithms have already gone rogue (Wired interview by Steven Levy, October 2017).
"If you think about the internet as weaving all of us together, transmitting ideas, in some sense an AI might be the equivalent of a multicellular being, and we're its microbiome, as opposed to the idea that an AI will be like the golem or the Frankenstein [monster]. If that's the case, the systems we are building today, like Google and Facebook and financial markets, are really more important than the fake ethics of worrying about some far future AI. We tend to be afraid of new technology, and we tend to demonize it, but to me, you have to use it as an opportunity for introspection. Our fears ultimately should be of ourselves and other people."
Read the complete interview—and find out why financial markets are the first rogue AI—here
Tim O'Reilly's Vision of the Future (BBC World Service podcast Click, October 2017).
"Technology does what we ask it to. But it's a little bit like the genies of Arabian mythology. We don't quite know what we're asking, and it almost always turns out that we didn't ask the question quite right. So Facebook didn't mean to create hyperpartisanship in America, for example. They didn't mean to create avenues for fake news, for spammers, for foreign agents to interfere in the US election, but they did. And we expect them to work on their algorithms; we expect them to work on their business process; we expect them to fix it. But here's the core idea that's so important. Our entire economy is run by algorithms..."
Listen to the podcast here.
Mapping the future with Tim O'Reilly (Interview on the Soonish podcast, October 2017).
When Tim O'Reilly talks, Silicon Valley listens. In this special episode, O'Reilly tells us about his new book WTF, which argues that the technology industry has become tone-deaf—and that the only way to avoid mass technological unemployment and achieve shared prosperity is to rethink the algorithms that govern our whole economy.
Listen to the podcast here.
Harry Potter. Tim O'Reilly. Tove Jansson (BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking, interview with Anne McElvoy, October 2017).
"I think that our financial markets are also one of these kind of AIs that we're living within; an algorithmic system that tells companies what to do. And 30, 40 years ago we started telling companies 'Optimize for share price above all else. Treat people as a cost to be eliminated.' That sounds a lot like the most dystopian versions of AI. 'Get rid of people.'"
Listen to the complete interview here.
Breaking up tech: Regulators increasingly are challenging Facebook, Amazon, and Google on how they're managing their dominant market positions (Barron's cover story, October 2017).
If these giants get sideswiped, it could be because of the fatal flaw in large tech companies that's often drawn social ire and regulation—the will to exploit their dominance. "The biggest thing they're vulnerable to is that they work too hard to protect their existing businesses," says O'Reilly. "That's always where companies get it wrong—Microsoft got it wrong, IBM before them got it wrong—they basically did things to extract money from customers rather than benefit customers," he says. How the current tech titans meet this challenge likely will determine how shareholders fare as well.
Read the full story here.
a16z Podcast: Platforming the future (From Andreessen Horowitz, October 2017).
In this hallway-style podcast conversation, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly and a16z partner Benedict Evans discuss how we make sense of the most recent wave of new technologies—technologies that are perhaps more transformative than any we’ve seen before—and how we think about the capabilities they might have that we haven’t yet even considered&hgellip; We are also in the midst of so much foundational change happening so fast, that we as a society have some very large questions—and answers—to consider.
Listen to the podcast here
Tim O'Reilly on the future of technology (Video interview with James Maguire of Datamation on the Emerging Tech podcast, October 2017).
"The kinds of jobs that we have to understand may be part of our future may require different kinds of skills. When you think about AI routinizing being an analyst at a bank..or some of the clerical stuff, that's machine work. But think about being a good teacher. Think about being a good caregiver. These are things that we actually don't value very highly, and maybe we should be valuing them more highly."
Watch the interview here.
Reality is an activity of the most august imagination: A conversation with Tim O'Reilly (Edge, October 2017).
"Our job is to imagine a better future, because if we can imagine it, we can create it. But it starts with that imagination. The future that we can imagine shouldn't be a dystopian vision of robots that are wiping us out, of climate change that is going to destroy our society. It should be a vision of how we will rise to the challenges that we face in the next century, that we will build an enduring civilization, and that we will build a world that is better for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It should be a vision that we will become one of those long-lasting species rather than a flash in the pan that wipes itself out because of its lack of foresight."
You can see how poetry, history, technology, and science are all telling us the same thing: "Make it new!" Watch the full interview here.
The secret of happiness and living a good life: "Make tea. Empty dishwasher. Hang laundry." (Thrive Global, October 2017).
Read Tim's responses to the Thrive Questionnaire, an ongoing series that provides an intimate look inside the lives of some of the world's most successful people.
The new world of work: A forum at the Churchill Club (Interviewed by Elizabeth Dwoskin, Silicon Valley Correspondent at the Washington Post, September 2017).
"We are seeing an economy increasingly dominated by giant platforms, and we have to start thinking about how do those platforms invigorate and enrich our society rather than just enrich their creators."
Watch the video here.
The Future and Why We Should "Work on Stuff that Matters" (Interview by Gretchen Rubin, October 2017).
"'Investors' are not really investors. They are bettors in the financial market casino, while the world's great problems—and the people who could be solving them—are no longer seen as the proper focus for investment. We have told our companies to optimize for 'the bottom line,' while treating people as a cost to be eliminated. It doesn't have to be that way. We can build an economy that treats people as an asset to invest in."
Read the complete interview here.
Tim O'Reilly Says Don't Eat the Ecosystem, a Lesson for Voice Platforms (Interview on the VoiceFirst Roundtable podcast with host Bradley Metrock, September 2017).
"The book is really a meditation on what we learn from the great technology platforms about the future of the economy. And one of the key things that we learn is that these platforms…can't just serve their users. They have to actually create a rich ecosystem of suppliers."
Listen to the podcast here.
Ethics are fundamental to a company (CNBC Squawk Box, September 2017). In response to host Jon Fortt’s question about whether companies need a chief ethics officer:
"No. The CEO must be the chief ethics officer!"
Facebook Live video capture from Airbnb headquarters (September 2017). The second episode of Airbnb's Book Series, beamed out to Airbnb hosts around the world, featured a discussion of relevant themes from WTF?
"If in fact the future belongs to networked platforms, they actually have to become a source of employment; they have to become a source of income. It doesn't have to be the traditional job, but we do have to build this great circulatory system in which people get paid and create things that other people want, and that is the heart of what we call an economy."
Watch the video here.
Tech innovator Tim O'Reilly: Don't fear technology, robots or the future (The Press Democrat, September 2017).
"Right now I'm optimistic about the subject of jobs. What I'm not optimistic about are the moral values of business. You realize that our financial markets also are in an algorithmic system with an objective function, which is to maximize shareholder value. We actually just created our own rogue AI. The reason it is the most important one is because Google and Facebook and all the other AIs are answerable to it. That's why in some sense the financial markets are the master AI."
Read the full interview here.
Tim O'Reilly thinks focusing less on shareholders might just save the world (TechCrunch, September 2017).
"Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media and author of a new book, 'WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us,' thinks a lot of (Silicon Valley's) problems could be solved if only big tech would focus a little less on profits and more on enabling other companies to be built atop of, or in partnership, with their platforms. In fact, his book, which is part memoir and part case study, is largely an entreaty to do things differently before it's too late."
Read the full interview here.
Roundtable with Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Bryce Roberts (August 2017). When I mentioned on Twitter what a great time I'd had at lunch in Chicago with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (founders of Basecamp, CEO and CTO, respectively), Bryce Roberts (my partner at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and the founder of Indie.vc) asked us to get together for a live indie.vc webcast. Basecamp and O'Reilly Media have been in business for nearly two and four decades, respectively. Both companies remain independent and profitable to this day. We have built our businesses on our own terms, from day one, without venture capital. In this one-hour live discussion, we talked about what it's like to run a tech business outside of Silicon Valley and the advantages of bootstrapping a business and staying in it for the long haul rather than taking VC money and entering the race for the exits.
The Future of Economic Leadership (July 2017). The World Affairs Council produced a short video of my thoughts on the lessons of the US government's post-WWII spending program, which fueled an unprecedented period of economic growth and prosperity across the country. While the challenges we face today are enormous—climate change, crumbling infrastructure, and a growing wealth gap among them—bold government leadership can provide solutions that will make the nation stronger. "The leadership we need is not 'Let's somehow encourage the market through some magic fairy dust to produce jobs.' It's to exert leadership about what needs doing!"
Uber's Scandal Provides a Chance to Remake Silicon Valley (Wired.com, 6/29/17). I reflect on Uber's scandals and consequent management turmoil, and put them in the larger context of the incentives that lead to bad behavior:
"The saddest thing about Uber is that it isn't an exception. It is what we get when we tell companies that creating shareholder value is the primary goal of an organization. Creating real value for customers, workers, and society becomes secondary to creating value for investors."
Live from the Aspen Ideas Festival. I talked with NY Times bestselling author Charles Duhigg about my forthcoming book in a Facebook Live broadcast from the Aspen Ideas Festival on June 29, 2017. We talked about some of the key messages in my book, but also reflect on some of the ideas in Charles' book The Power of Habit and how they relate to anxiety about AI and the rise of Trump.
Charles and I also did a more formal interview about my book at the Festival the next day, enlivened by an active Q&A with audience participants including Steve Case, whose "Rise of the Rest" tour is exploring entrepreneurship outside of Silicon Valley. In addition, I participated in a number of panels, including one on The Future of Intelligence with Gary Marcus, Michael Chui, and Erik Schatzker. (That one drilled down into industries most likely to be affected first by AI.)
Do More: What Amazon Teaches Us About AI and the "Jobless Future" (Medium, June 2017). I reflect on the fact that Amazon added hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers at the same time as they added 45,000 warehouse robots. Rather than simply pursuing efficiency, Amazon has upped the ante, improving their speed of delivery (which is now same-day for many products in some locations) and continuing to drive what Jeff calls "the flywheel" of Amazon's success.
"Amazon reminds us again and again that it isn't technology that eliminates jobs, it is the short-sighted business decisions that use technology simply to cut costs and fatten corporate profits.
This is the master design pattern for applying technology: Do more. Do things that were previously unimaginable."
Hey Silicon Valley: President Obama has a to-do list for you (Wired, November 2016).
"The best way for the tech industry to tackle inequality is for it to do what it's supposed to do: innovate in ways that create actual gains in growth and productivity—that don't just replace people but empower them to do what was previously impossible."
Read the full article here.
My talk at the White House Frontiers Conference. I opened for President Obama at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh (October 2016), talking about the lessons of the first industrial revolution for the AI driven future. I thought it was pretty cool that the White House comms team approved a talk with the title WTF? They gulped, but then said OK.
Discussion with McKinsey's James Manyika about The Next Economy. I discuss my ideas about the Next Economy with James Manyika, senior partner at McKinsey & Company and director of the McKinsey Global Institute. Part one discusses what I consider the central design pattern of technology: to enable people to do things that were previously impossible, resulting in new kinds of productivity. But I worry that "We have created an extractive economy. We have abandoned the idea that growth is only good if it leads to prosperity for all." In part two, James and I talk about the applications of this design pattern to business.
Why we'll never run out of jobs. Excerpt from my talk at the O'Reilly AI Conference, 9/26/16. The full talk is available on Safari.
A deficit of idealism. In July 2016, I spoke with John Battelle about why I believe that is not just the obligation, but also the self-interest of every company, to build a robust society. I also discuss why I called my book "WTF," how to ensure that tech's role in society is as a force for good, how I feel about the B Corp designation, and the magic of unicorns. One of the nice things that John did is provide a transcript along with the video! This is probably one of the best condensed presentations of my key ideas on the subject of tech and the economy.
Makers and Takers. I interviewed Rana Foroohar at the World Affairs Council (June 2016). I loved Rana's book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, and we enjoyed a wide ranging conversation about the role of the financial industry in the rise of inequality in America and around the world.
Let's optimize for the long term An interview with Peter Leyden, founder of the Reinventors Network. "Let's stop optimizing for the short-term. Let's start optimizing for the long-term, and think about how to make the society we want," I said. I acknowledge that technology may be destroying jobs today, but only because we've built incentives into our economy to encourage those choices.
Quoted in Sidelights: “‘WTF’ is an expression, either of amazement or dismay. And technology can give us both; in fact, it often is. I’m saying, ‘What’s the future? It can be the WTF of amazement or the WTF of dismay, and it’s up to us to decide which one we want.’”
‘WTF?’ author Tim O’Reilly says tech and business elites are setting the world up for ‘war and revolution’
O’Reilly’s new book says we have to choose what the future will be.
By Eric Johnson@HeyHeyESJ Oct 18, 2017, 6:30am EDT
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‘WTF’ author and O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images for LinkedIn
O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly says he’s trying to prevent a “disaster.”
On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, O’Reilly explained how the title of his new book, “WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us,” can be read in two ways.
“‘WTF’ is an expression, either of amazement or dismay,” he said. “And technology can give us both; in fact, it often is. I’m saying, ‘What’s the future? It can be the WTF of amazement or the WTF of dismay, and it’s up to us to decide which one we want.’”
However, O’Reilly fears that today’s prevailing philosophy of elevating profit above all other goals is setting the entire economy down a dangerous path. When Wall Street’s priorities come before society’s, he said, the financial markets become a “rogue AI,” making choices that are ultimately bad for us.
“We have, over the last 30 or 40 years, created a global system which has as its objective function — the thing you’re optimizing for — they are telling companies, ‘Optimize for one thing, and one thing only: corporate profit,’” O’Reilly said. “And that’s become so enshrined. It’s really ruling every company. That is the master algorithm, and it is fundamentally hostile to humanity.”
You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On the new podcast, O’Reilly said tech companies are merely the “most visible incarnation” of change, and many of them create things that are useful to society — a virtue he said he could not apply to people like day traders. But generally, he predicted that today’s elites are headed for a “big backlash.”
“I think we’re in the throes of a period where technology is going to make possible great wealth for all people, or great wealth for a small number of people, which is what it’s doing now,” he said. “If the people who are wealthy and powerful now keep on the path that we’re going, we are going to see another period of war and revolution and great instability.”
“In an odd way, we may be saved by climate change, in the way that World War II pulled us out of the Great Depression, and we realized that we had to actually invest in the future because things were so bad,” O’Reilly added. “We might end up having events like that. In a dismaying WTF future, we do end up with war and instability that we don’t get out of. We definitely have the possibility of very bright futures, or very dark futures.”
If you like this show, you should also sample our other podcasts:
Recode Media with Peter Kafka features no-nonsense conversations with the smartest and most interesting people in the media world, with new episodes every Thursday. Use these links to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Too Embarrassed to Ask, hosted by Kara Swisher and The Verge's Lauren Goode, answers the tech questions sent in by our readers and listeners. You can hear new episodes every Friday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
And Recode Replay has all the audio from our live events, including the Code Conference, Code Media and the Code Commerce Series. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.
If you like what we’re doing, please write a review on Apple Podcasts— and if you don’t, just tweet-strafe Kara.
Quoted in Sidelights: “Part memoir and part forward-leaning manifesto, it’s full of contrarian insights and fresh lenses for framing tech’s ever-baffling trajectory,” Rob Reid observed on the Arstechnica Web site. “All is backed up with data, facts, and first-hand reports from Tim’s decades on the front lines. And it’s steeped in a level-headed positivity that elegantly rebuts the sudden knee-jerk pessimism of a community that (let’s face it) has it pretty good, compared to most humans across history.”
“empathy and optimism” to his discussion of the impact of technology. “Not the blind optimism of the naïve,” Reid explained. “Not the self-serving optimism of the wealthy libertarian. But the fact-based optimism of a thoughtful technologist who is, at bottom, a realist.”
Tim O’Reilly on why the future probably won’t be all that terrible
Economies as AI, humans as gut bacteria for tech, and how the Luddites got it wrong.
ROB REID - 10/10/2017, 9:32 PM
Enlarge / Some classic O'Reilly titles. (OK, not really. But honestly these titles would teach some folks very valuable devops skills.)
@ThePracticalDev
Author and long-time friend of Ars Technica Rob Reid recently had the opportunity to interview legendary publisher Tim O'Reilly about O'Reilly's new future-focused nonfiction book. Given O'Reilly's importance and influence—and who hasn't consulted at least one of his company's animal-covered books to shed light on some difficult bit of tech?—we asked Rob to write us a summary of the interview that we could share with the Ars audience. The full interview is embedded in this piece.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the influence Tim O’Reilly has had on tech over his career’s long span. But I’ll try. First, he’s the preeminent publisher in a modern field that inhales books despite their ancient form, as software developers, IT folks, and others constantly race to keep up with the languages and skillsets of their fields. He also launched the first commercial website long before Netscape or Yahoo even incorporated (prefiguring another huge trend: AOL bought that site, then immediately screwed it up).
FURTHER READING
Copyright Math: a quantitative reasoning master class by Rob Reid (video)
Convinced the Web would be hot, his company convened the summit at which Marc Andreessen and Tim Berners Lee first met. He later hosted the conclave whereat "open source software" was quite literally named, and the open source movement’s precepts were enunciated. Though he didn’t coin the term, Tim (basically) named the Web 2.0 era and also defined it with a wildly influential article and conference series. He later published the magazine that gave us both the word “maker” and the Maker Faire, and the magazine still sits at the heart of the maker movement.
FURTHER READING
John Hodgman and Rob Reid talk Year Zero, Aliens, and the RIAA
Having failed to overstate Tim’s significance, I’ll now tell you about his new book, WTF, which comes out today. As we all know, this stands for “What’s the Future.” As Tim points out, "WTF" can be a cry of either dismay or amazement. An optimist by nature, he’s trying to nudge us toward the latter, despite the overwhelming 2017-ness of things. I recently caught up with Tim for a wide-ranging discussion of his book, the future, his personal history, and the true meaning of WTF. Our interview is the latest episode of the After On podcast. You can listen via your podcasting app (just hit Search and type in “After On”) or by clicking right here:
Picture the future
I’m not a book reviewer and this is not a review—though I will say that, for me, Tim’s book is a feast. Part memoir and part forward-leaning manifesto, it’s full of contrarian insights and fresh lenses for framing tech’s ever-baffling trajectory. All is backed up with data, facts, and first-hand reports from Tim’s decades on the front lines. And it’s steeped in a level-headed positivity that elegantly rebuts the sudden knee-jerk pessimism of a community that (let’s face it) has it pretty good, compared to most humans across history.
An example: though I admire the man, Jaron Lanier once wrecked my day by eloquently observing: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion dollars. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people.”
In our interview (and also in his book), Tim quashes this perspective, which he gently labels “impossibly wrong.” Instagram is but a wee epiphenomenon, a glittering but tiny speck on the hull of a leviathan transformation—one that has created untold millions of jobs (and, yes, destroyed millions of others). “Think of the mountain of work that’s required to bring us Instagram,” Tim says. “This massive economy of data centers. Of Internet connectivity. Of the manufacturing of phones, which are more ubiquitous than cameras ever were. And think about the number of little shops there are, everywhere, selling cell phones. How many people work for Comcast, T-Mobile, Sprint, and all the [other] carriers. And all of the cable that had to be laid… just immense amounts of work in order for that Instagram culture to exist.”
Humans as technology's gut bacteria
This isn’t to say Tim lacks empathy for the dislocated. Indeed, he brims with it and is flat-out denunciatory when discussing modern inequities. He likens emergent aspects of our world to algorithms pursuing master “fitness functions.” Much as Google is geared to maximize ad revenue, the markets drive companies to maximize profits at the cost of all other goals and values (he goes so far as to liken the financial markets to a rogue AI). All of this notwithstanding, Tim remains highly invested in the free market system. He’s an entrepreneur with 400 mouths to feed at O’Reilly Media, after all—a trick he manages quite well.
Tim talks deeply about platforms in our interview and what he calls “thick marketplaces.” He extends this definition beyond literal markets like eBay to more figurative ones, like the Microsoft ecosystem of the '90s. Those who desecrate their marketplaces by devouring participants they should empower—again, think Microsoft in the '90s, or more recently, Twitter—do so at great ultimate cost to themselves.
“Think of the mountain of work that’s required to bring us Instagram,” Tim says.
Our interview touches on the fascinating notion that humanity could be viewed as a microbiome for massive techplexes like Google and Facebook. I’ll admit to a weakness for this concept, as I developed it independently in my most recent novel (where my treatment is more playful than Tim’s, though I take the idea very seriously). In the '90s, he was struck by how certain engineers were being deployed almost like software components within organic, ever-evolving “applications” like Yahoo. Back when applications generally traveled as physical totems frozen onto discs, this was a true WTF moment.
Tim has since watched this symbiosis grow ever deeper. AI applications are now often trained by humans via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. And consider how Google gets smarter whenever we choose one link over the others on a page—then either snap back to Google because the link wasn’t suitable or vanish because it was. “So there’s a symbiotic intelligence,” he points out. “There’s people inside it—the programmers who write the algorithms and manage the workflows. And then there’s people outside, who are communicating with it.”
We are the powerhouse of the cell
It gets deeper when companies like Uber and Lyft bridge into the physical world. At Lyft headquarters, you might view software components as being like workers in a factory, with programmers for managers. Managers who get signals from customers and the market and continually coach their components to do better jobs. The components themselves manage another level of worker—the drivers—who are actually “augmented workers,” their capabilities heightened by digital tools like mapping services. Tim calls these sorts of companies “compound organisms,” or even “compound beings. He compares them to mammalian cells, which long ago teamed up with sovereign organisms, which are now our mitochondria (your mitochondria's DNA is distinct from your own, attesting to its indie roots).
All this could lead to bad outcomes to those on the lower rungs. But it could also lead to wonderful ones (consider how psyched we should all be to live on this side of the past century’s breakthroughs—societal imperfections notwithstanding). Tim points a cautionary finger at the blunders we could make from here and does not minimize them. But on balance, he’s optimistic. I’ll add that his personal story is a nice case study for non-STEM folks, because Tim—like the founders of Ars Technica itself—dedicated his higher education to studying dead languages (specifically, Latin and Greek). As one who also prepared for his tech career by studying a non-programming language (in my case, Arabic), I approve.
Tim foresees smooth sailing if society can better provide for those being left behind. In this, he cites the bogeymen of all tech optimists, the Luddites. But he suffuses his discussion of them with both empathy and optimism. Not the blind optimism of the naïve. Not the self-serving optimism of the wealthy libertarian. But the fact-based optimism of a thoughtful technologist who is, at bottom, a realist.
I’ll close with a passage about the Luddites from Tim’s book. I also cited these words in our interview, because I find them so lyrical and so characteristic of Tim’s perspective:
They were right to be afraid. The decades ahead were grim. Machines did replace human labor, and it took time for society to adjust.
But those weavers couldn’t imagine that their descendants would have more clothing than the kings and queens of Europe, that ordinary people would eat the fruits of summer in the depths of winter. They couldn’t imagine that we’d tunnel through mountains and under the sea, that we’d fly through the air, crossing continents in hours, that we’d build cities in the desert with buildings a half mile high, that we’d stand on the moon and put spacecraft in orbit around distant planets, that we would eliminate so many scourges of disease. And they couldn’t imagine that their children would find meaningful work bringing all of these things to life.
Rob Reid (@Rob_Reid on Twitter) founded the company that built the Rhapsody music service, and now writes science fiction for Random House/Del Rey. His new novel and his podcast are both called "After On."
Tim O’Reilly: It’s Time to Rewrite the Rules of Our Economy
The economic game is enormously fun for far too few players, and an increasingly miserable experience for many others.
By Tim O’Reilly
Future economic historians may look back wryly at this period when we worshipped the divine right of capital while looking down on our ancestors who believed in the divine right of kings.
Business leaders making decisions to outsource jobs to low-wage countries or to replace workers with machines, or politicians who insist that it is “the market” that makes them unable to require companies to pay a living wage, rely on the defense that they are only following the laws of economics. But the things economists study are not natural phenomena like the laws of motion uncovered by Kepler and Newton.
Right now we’re at an inflection point, where many rules are being profoundly rewritten. Much as happened during the industrial revolution, new technology is rendering obsolete whole classes of employment while making untold new wonders possible. It is making some people very rich, and others much poorer.
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I am confident that the invisible hand can do its work. But not without a lot of struggle. The political convulsions we’ve seen in the United Kingdom and in the United States are a testament to the difficulties we face. We are heading into a very risky time. Rising global inequality is triggering a political backlash that could lead to profound destabilization of both society and the economy. The problem is that in our free market economy, we found a way to make society as a whole far richer, but the benefits are unevenly distributed. Some people are far better off, while others are worse off.
Many discussions of our technological future assume that the fruits of productivity will be distributed fairly and to the satisfaction of all. That is clearly not the case. Right now, the economic game is enormously fun for far too few players, and an increasingly miserable experience for many others.
As the incomes of ordinary consumers stagnated, companies kicked the can down the road a few decades by encouraging them to pay for goods on credit, but that short-term strategy is crashing down. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written during the most hellish days of the first industrial revolution, the poet William Blake issued what might well be a rule as certain as those issued by any economist: “The Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer, as a sea, received the excess of his delights.”
We can wait for the push and pull of the many players in the game to work things out, or we can try out different strategies for getting to optimal outcomes more quickly. As Joseph Stiglitz so powerfully reminded us in his book of that name, we can rewrite the rules.
The barriers to fresh thinking are even higher in politics than in business. The Overton Window, a term introduced by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, says that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window framing a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion. There are ideas that a politician simply cannot recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office.
Once we’ve pushed the Overton Window wide open, we can start working toward more desirable futures, in which machines don’t replace humans, but allow us to build a next economy that will elicit the WTF? of astonishment rather than the WTF? of dismay.
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
I’m not an economist, a politician, or a financier equipped with quick answers as to why things can or can’t change. I’m a technologist and an entrepreneur who is used to noticing discrepancies between the way things are and the way they could be, and asking questions whose answers might point the way to better futures.
Why do we have lower taxes on capital when it is so abundant that much of it is sitting on the sidelines rather than being put to work in our economy? Why do we tax labor income more highly when one of the problems in our economy is lack of aggregate consumer demand because ordinary people don’t have money in their pockets? When economists like former Treasury secretary Larry Summers talk about “secular stagnation,” this is what they are referring to. “The main constraint on the industrial world’s economy today is on the demand, rather than the supply, side,” Summers wrote.
Why do we treat purely financial investments as equivalent to real business investment? “Only around 15% of the money flowing from financial institutions actually makes its way into business investment,” says Rana Foroohar. “The rest gets moved around a closed financial loop, via the buying and selling of existing assets, like real estate, stocks, and bonds.” There is some need for liquidity in the system, but 85%? As we’ll see in the next chapter, this great money river is accessible only to a small part of our population, and relentlessly directs capital away from the real economy.
Why do productive and nonproductive investments get the same capital gains treatment? Holding a stock for a year is not the same as working for decades to create the company that it represents a share of, or investing in a new company with no certainty of return.
John Maynard Keynes recognized this problem eighty years ago during the depths of the Great Depression that followed the speculative excesses of the 1920s, writing in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”
Keynes continued, “The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only.” Warren Buffett has proven that this is actually a very good strategy. Yet our policies don’t favor the kind of value investing that Buffett practices.
A financial transactions tax calibrated to eliminate all the benefits of front-running and other forms of high-speed market manipulation would be a good place to start, but we could go much further in taxing financial speculation while rewarding productive investment with lower rates. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, suggests that at a minimum, long-term capital gains treatment should begin at three years rather than one, with a declining rate for each additional year that an asset is held.
We could even institute a wealth tax such as proposed by Thomas Piketty. And if we were to tax carbon rather than labor, rather than starting by substituting a carbon tax for income taxes, it might be better to substitute a carbon tax for Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes. These rule changes might be costly to some capital owners but might well benefit society overall.
These are political decisions as much as they are purely economic or business decisions. And that is appropriate. Economic policy shapes the future not just for one person or one company, but for all of us. But we should realize that it is in our self-interest to improve the rules we are now playing under. In his article about income inequality, Joseph Stiglitz explained how Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman writing about American democracy in the 1840s, considered “self-interest properly understood” to be “a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society.”
“The last two words were the key,” Stiglitz wrote. “Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest ‘properly understood’ is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.”
Throughout history and across continents, economies have played the game using different rules: No one can own the land. All land belongs to kings and aristocrats. Property is entailed and cannot be sold by the owners or heirs. All property should be held in common. Property should be private. Labor belongs to kings and aristocrats and must be supplied on demand. A man’s labor is his own. Women belong to men. Women are independent economic actors. Children are a great source of cheap labor. Child labor is a violation of human rights. Humans can be the property of other humans. No human can be enslaved by another.
We look back at some of these rules as the mark of a just society and others as barbaric. But none of them was the inevitable way of the world.
Here is one of the failed rules of today’s economy: Human labor should be eliminated as a cost whenever possible. This will increase the profits of a business, and richly reward investors. These profits will trickle down to the rest of society.
The evidence is in. This rule doesn’t work. It’s time to rewrite the rules. We need to play the game of business as if people matter.
Adapted from WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, with permission from HarperBusiness
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Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. Over the years, Tim has built a culture where sustainable innovation is a key tenet of business philosophy. His active engagement with technology communities both drives the company's product development and informs its marketing.
Tim is on the board of Safari Books Online and is a partner in O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
Tim graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a B.A. cum laude in classics. His honors thesis explored the tension between mysticism and logic in Plato's dialogues.
Any discussion of Tim is incomplete without a fuller understanding of the company he founded. O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, research, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, honing in on the technology trends that really matter and galvanizing their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
Publisher of the iconic "animal books" for software developers, creator of the first commercial website (GNN), organizer of the summit meeting that gave the open source software movement its name, leader in Gov 2.0 "government as a platform" efforts, and prime instigator of the DIY revolution through its MAKE magazine and Craftzine.com, O'Reilly Media continually concocts new ways to connect people with the information they need.
Tim O'Reilly
Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media; Partner, O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures
Tim O’Reilly is founder, CEO, and chairman of O’Reilly Media and a partner at early stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. He serves on the boards of Maker Media (which was spun out from O'Reilly Media in 2012), Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. A technical writer who grew his business from publishing to Web publishing to e-book publishing and event production, O’Reilly has a history of framing such terms and ideas as “open-source software,” “Web 2.0,” “the Maker movement,” “government as a platform,” and “the WTF economy.” As a venture capitalist he has invested in companies such as Blogger, Delicious, Foursquare, Bitly, and Chumby.
Aspen Ideas 2017 Bio
Quoted in Sidelights: "comforting and user-friendly" "a celebration of the tremendous potential of new tech."
WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
David Pitt
Booklist. 114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us. By Tim O'Reilly. Oct. 2017.448p. Harper, $32.99 (9780062565716); e-book, $16.99 (9780062565723). 629.8.
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 technologies--self-driving cars, for example, or robots that are so smart they are replacing humans in the workplace--without 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.--David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 22. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c1cafba. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161458
Quoted in Sidelights: “the argument gets a little scattershot,” O’Reilly’s “positive outlook is refreshing and engaging.”
O'Reilly, Tim: WTF?
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
O'Reilly, Tim WTF? Harper Business (Adult Nonfiction) $32.99 10, 10 ISBN: 978-0-06-256571-6
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"O'Reilly, Tim: WTF?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364920/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e36e5a6f. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364920
Quoted in Sidelights: “presentation is long-winded,” but allowed that WTF? is “an interesting, if somewhat breathless, look at what the future might hold.”
WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
Publishers Weekly. 264.33 (Aug. 14, 2017): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
Tim O'Reilly. Harper Business, $32.99 (448p) ISBN 978-0-06-256571-6
"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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"WTF: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 70. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717166/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=688ad2a3. Accessed 15 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717166
Quoted in Sidelights: “a memoir/business text/techno-utopian polemic that gestures at a revolutionary future while endorsing existing Silicon Valley systems and excusing their part in creating economic and social strife.” In her opinion, he shows little sympathy for those displaced by technology. Commenting on a passage about applications of technology by “new generation of users,” she wrote: “Tim O’Reilly sees this ‘new generation of users’ as baby boomers who were part of the counterculture movement in the 1960s but who now enjoy enough financial success to drop $150 to $200 on dinner for two in Oakland. As far as this book goes, he simply doesn’t see anyone else.”
But those weavers couldn’t imagine that their descendants would have more clothing than the kings and queens of Europe...
Tim O’Reilly, the “Oracle of Silicon Valley,” commenting on the myopia of the Luddites in his book “WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us”
David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images - Tim O'Reilly, founder and chief executive officer of O'Reilly Media, at a conference in San Francisco in 2012.
THOUGHT LEADING
WHY IS ANYONE LISTENING TO TIM O’REILLY?
In a new book, Silicon Valley’s favorite publisher praises the establishment while refusing to engage with its critics.
Molly Sauter
OCT—23—2017 09:21AM EST
WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us, the latest book from the influential conference organizer and Silicon Valley’s go-to technical publisher Tim O’Reilly, is a memoir/business text/techno-utopian polemic that gestures at a revolutionary future while endorsing existing Silicon Valley systems and excusing their part in creating economic and social strife. This is accomplished primarily through a pile-up of bizarrely miscued metaphors, the first of which pops up in the author bio describing O’Reilly as the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, “the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years.” Since O’Reilly sells metaphors as keys to understanding so heavily in his book, let’s just go with this one for a while.
When we think of the Gold Rush forty-niners today, we mostly imagine “placer mining,” plucking gold from riverbeds and streams. As these surface deposits depleted, investors built huge wooden flume systems, diverting rivers so paid miners could rip into the beds themselves. Once those deeper deposits were exhausted, miners started using new techniques like hydraulic mining, shooting high pressure streams of water against clearcut hillsides and cliff faces to reveal ore. These increasingly destructive techniques, coupled with the San Francisco peninsula’s population exploding from roughly 1,000 people in 1848 to over 36,000 in 1852, irrevocably changed the landscape of California, pulling up old growth forests, pushing aside rivers, and literally washing away into the Pacific Ocean some of the richest arable land on the North American continent. The Gold Rush turned huge swathes of California into “sacrifice zones” — geographic areas that have been permanently damaged or poisoned by industry.
Only a handful of the Gold Rush entrepreneurs made any money at all from their stakes. Instead, as Grey Brechin writes in Imperial San Francisco, “the real fortunes were made by city-based financiers in hardrock mercury mining, by commission merchants, and, above all, by those speculating in land and engaging in fraud on an epic scale.”
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To be fair, the “selling picks and shovels” quip pops up a lot in business, and one could argue it’s drifted from its original context. But the Gold Rush may be a more fitting metaphor for the technology business than even O’Reilly realizes. More than a century after the Gold Rush, the semiconductor industry created new sacrifice zones in the Santa Clara Valley and the Bay Area as it gave rise to the age of the personal computer, the internet, and O’Reilly’s career. California has nearly 100 Superfund sites, many due to the computer manufacturing process, which continues to inflict environmental damage in California and elsewhere, as has been chronicled by David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park in their excellent book, Silicon Valley of Dreams.
WTF, nearly 400 densely printed pages, plus notes, bibliography, and index, traces O’Reilly Media’s rise from humble technical writing consultancy founded in 1984 to its current dominant position as the tech publisher of record with titles like Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Mastering Bitcoin, and Javascript: The Good Parts. O’Reilly himself is a serial founder of technology conferences, like the Perl Conference, OSCON, and the exclusive Foo Camps (or “Friends of O’Reilly” Camps), which pioneered the un-conference format. People unironically refer to Tim O’Reilly as the “Oracle of Silicon Valley.”
In WTF, O’Reilly lays out his mile-high perspective on the current state of tech and where he thinks it should go. He argues that the path to a good future for humanity lies in systems like the gig economy, distributed sensors, and artificial intelligence. Sure, sometimes the use of technology leads to less than optimal outcomes, but O’Reilly argues that is the result of human error, not intrinsic aspects of the technology or business models he promotes here.
Unsurprisingly, O’Reilly believes that tech firms, particularly those led by people he knows personally, are in the best position to push society forward. He shares a telling anecdote where, at a dinner with LinkedIn founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, Hoffman explained Moore’s Law with this choice condescension: “You have to understand, Senator, that in Washington, you assume that every year things cost more and do less. In Silicon Valley, everyone expects our products to cost less every year and yet do more.” So much for the promise of the republic.
O’Reilly wants his readers to come away from this book thinking in maps and metaphors. Accurate maps, O’Reilly says, are the way to make sure “we aren’t blinded by old ideas.” This theme — that history creates blind spots — surfaces again and again. It’s this weird allergy to what is essentially knowing too much about the direct, personal impacts of his favorite technologies that causes some of O’Reilly’s most damaging missteps throughout the text.
O’REILLY BELIEVES THAT TECH FIRMS, PARTICULARLY THOSE LED BY PEOPLE HE KNOWS PERSONALLY, ARE IN THE BEST POSITION TO PUSH SOCIETY FORWARD.
Take O’Reilly’s treatment of Uber, a company he says is a “positive business model for the technology-driven economy of the future.” He knows that characterization might rub some people the wrong way, because the company is known for labor abuses and sexual harassment, but he doesn’t believe those facts are relevant. “It’s easy to forget that many of the people who invent the future do so by crashing through barriers, crushing competitors, and dominating a new industry by force of will as well as intellect,” he writes. Thomas Edison couldn’t have gotten where he did without electrocuting a few elephants, after all.
O’Reilly’s “map” of Uber is an illustrated affair with color-coded ovals and connections running every which way linking things like “augmented workers,” “managed by algorithm,” and “magical user experience.” He assigns Uber the tagline, “Transportation as reliable as running water.” What I think O’Reilly means here is that clean water runs cleanly and freely from the tap thanks to invisible embedded infrastructure, and Uber’s algorithmically managed system of incentives brings enough drivers onto the roads to satisfy rider demand in a way that seems magical to the user. However, the reality is that running water in the U.S. is increasingly unreliable. Americans’ water bills are skyrocketing as corporate raids on municipal water tables coupled with the effects of climate change drive the levels of reservoirs down. One study found that water bills may become too expensive for a third of U.S. households within five years. And of course, over in Flint, Michigan, the phrase “running water” connotes a disastrous attempt to cut costs in 2014 that led to an epidemic of lead poisoning that is still ongoing.
Running water does have its own analogues to Uber: multinational corporations like Nestle, which routinely outbid municipalities for the rights to their own water. That water gets pumped out and shipped off to be sold in plastic bottles (sometimes while those municipalities are suffering drought conditions). Uber and Nestle both resell at a profit public or private resources that are not theirs. In Uber’s case, it’s the cars its drivers already own or lease at their own expense. In Nestle’s case, it’s water from public lands leased for trivial fees. Both companies flout regulations and norms intended to prevent labor abuses, market monopolization, or environmental and human devastation, often suffering few negative consequences; both rely on business models that rely on replacing or undermining public goods and infrastructures with private, for-profit alternatives. While describing Uber’s goal of “Replacing [Car] Ownership with [Uber] Access,” O’Reilly quotes a “customer in Los Angeles” saying, “I tell people I live in LA like it’s New York. Uber and Lyft are my public transit station.” Remember when Lyft invented a bus?
Tents on the lawn at foo camp in 2009 at the O’Reilly Media offices in Sebastopol, California.
Tents on the lawn at foo camp in 2009 at the O’Reilly Media offices in Sebastopol, California. Michael Edson / Flickr
But it’s perhaps O’Reilly’s butchered metaphor for hashtags that best illustrates his eagerness to overlook negative externalities:
Many of [the hashtags] didn’t stick, but if enough people adopted one, it became the real world equivalent of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s words in Star Wars: ‘I felt a great disturbance in the Force… as if a million voices suddenly cried out.’ And the voices cried out: #iranelection #haitiearthquake #occupywallstreet
Because I have seen Star Wars, like roughly everyone else who would pick up a book like this, I know what scene that quote is from. It’s the one where the Empire destroys Princess Leia’s home planet Alderaan as a “demonstration” of the Death Star’s destructive power — a totalitarian genocide of literally planetary proportions. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s full quote is, “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”
I don’t think hashtags are like the Death Star. But I also don’t understand why Tim O’Reilly, who is by all accounts a smart guy, thinks that his readers wouldn’t recognize that scene or that quote, or why he thinks that it’s a good metaphor for Twitter hashtags. “Millions of voices” crying out and “being suddenly silenced” might be an interesting reference to Twitter’s ability to coax conversations into life and arbitrarily cut them off by censoring content, but I don’t think this was what Tim O’Reilly was thinking. I don’t know what he was thinking.
O’Reilly dumping metaphors and references into the text without regard for what they actually mean reflects how this book frames technology and business. O’Reilly simply isn’t interested in what he isn’t interested in: perspectives that aren’t his, arguments he doesn’t agree with, contexts and history he thinks are irrelevent. He narrates himself explaining technology to regulators or critics who just don’t understand “how all the pieces of the model fit together,” but doesn’t address their arguments. Discussing the “gig economy” business model, O’Reilly says:
“There are those who argue that Uber and Lyft are simply trying to avoid paying benefits by keeping their workers as independent contractors rather than as employees. It isn’t that simple. Yes, it does save them money, but independent-contractor status is also important to the scalability and flexibility of [Uber’s business] model.”
This is the only time O’Reilly addresses the benefits and labor rights dodge that is central to the gig economy. His comment is, independent contractors are what makes the wheels on the Uber go ‘round, so it’s fine. He rips into big retail companies later for using tricky scheduling algorithms to keep workers on benefits-less part-time status and goes after Walmart for relying on the welfare system to subsidize its poverty level wages. He doesn’t realize that these companies originated the playbook Uber adapted: selling a model of precarious labor based on on-demand piece-work, masked with the prestige of being a “flexible independent contractor.”
O’REILLY SEES THE “NEW GENERATION OF USERS” AS BABY BOOMERS WHO WERE PART OF THE COUNTERCULTURE MOVEMENT IN THE ‘60S BUT NOW ENJOY ENOUGH FINANCIAL SUCCESS TO DROP $150 ON DINNER FOR TWO IN OAKLAND.
O’Reilly has flashes of lucidity, where he seems to be able to see the forest and the trees. His chapter, “Supermoney,” summarizes many of the problems financial capitalism — capitalism’s latest evolution that depends more on the stock market and complex financial instruments than the traditional market of physical goods and services — has spawned. His writing on how tech’s focus on venture capital valuations and stock options has twisted the priorities of entrepreneurs and funders, incenting them to chase sky-high valuations and acquisition instead of creating stable companies with a solid, satisfied customer base, is incisive. But since that analysis arrives after nearly 300 pages of genuflection to the insecure independent contractor labor model and the magic of algorithms, I worry that most readers will never get to it. These conclusions are oddly abrupt, appearing to contradict the arguments that precede them. Financial capitalism is bad, he concludes, but all the values and practices and ideologies that make financial capitalism an inevitable system — those are great!
Like a lot of business books by big names, Tim O’Reilly’s book is for people who are already like him. In the introduction, O’Reilly gives us an example of what a “new generation of users” might ask their AI-enabled smartphones:
“Siri, make me a six p.m. reservation for two at Camino.”
“Alexa, play me ‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’”
“Okay, Google, remind me to buy currants the next time I’m at Piedmont Grocery.”
Camino is, according to the New York Times, a “Cali-Med-Asian” restaurant in Oakland, California, the kind with an open kitchen and communal tables and $36 grilled chicken. “Ballad of a Thin Man” appeared on Bob Dylan’s 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited, a grinding dirge that repeatedly chastises its hapless, hopelessly square protagonist, “Something is happening here and you don't know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?” Piedmont Grocery is a gourmet grocery store, also in Oakland, whose website wants you to know that “Yes, we do carry things like truffle paste, fleur de sel and Umami Paste [sic].”
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In short, Tim O’Reilly sees this “new generation of users” as baby boomers who were part of the counterculture movement in the 1960s but who now enjoy enough financial success to drop $150 to $200 on dinner for two in Oakland. As far as this book goes, he simply doesn’t see anyone else.
This is ironic because O’Reilly’s favorite riposte to those who will not be led down his primrose path is that they lack imagination. Commenting on the Luddites, weavers who destroyed automated looms rather than allow themselves to be replaced by machines and let their local, rural communities be devastated in the name of short-term profit, O’Reilly faults them for not instead imagining “...that their descendants would have more clothing than the kings and queens of Europe, that ordinary people would eat the fruits of summer in the depths of winter. They couldn’t imagine that we’d tunnel through mountains and under the sea, that we’d fly through the air, crossing continents in hours, that we’d build cities in the desert with buildings a half mile high, that we’d stand on the moon and put spacecraft in orbit around distant planets.…”
If you’ve lost your job, and can’t find another one, or were never able to find steady full-time employment in the first place between automation, outsourcing, and strings of financial meltdowns, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know you shouldn’t be mad. If you’ve been driven into the exploitative arms of the gig economy because the jobs you have been able to find don’t pay a living wage, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know this is a great opportunity. If ever you find yourself being evicted from an apartment you can’t afford because Airbnb has fatally distorted the rental economy in your city, wondering how you’ll pay for the health care you need and the food you need and the student loans you carry with your miscellaneous collection of gigs and jobs and plasma donations, feeling like you’re part of a generational sacrifice zone, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know that it will be worth it, someday, for someone, a long time from now, somewhere in the future.
Molly Sauter is the author of The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet.
Quoted in Sidelights: “O’Reilly argues that our financial markets are currently operating just like the runaway [artificial intelligence] we most fear, incentivising corporate bosses to do bad things and destroy society,” John Thornhill reported in the Financial Times. The book, he continued, “is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society.” He found O’Reilly “rather Pollyanna-ish about the prospects of technology creating and augmenting jobs, rather than destroying them,” but nonetheless dubbed WTF? “a jaunty read with a compelling narrative” that might cause some tech executives “to dwell on the social and political impact of what they do.”
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WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, by Tim O’Reilly
A longstanding Silicon Valley thinker suggests ways to keep humans and tech aligned
O’Reilly defends Uber, arguing that it has brought job opportunities to thousands of drivers and is subject to private regulation by its millions of users © Reuters
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Review by John Thornhill NOVEMBER 13, 2017 Print this page9
We seem to worry a lot these days about the dangers of a rogue artificial intelligence threatening our future survival.
Tim O’Reilly claims it already exists, just not in the form we imagine.
In his punchy and provocative book, O’Reilly argues that our financial markets are currently operating just like the runaway AI we most fear, incentivising corporate bosses to do bad things and destroy society. The “master algorithm” of shareholder capitalism coerces companies to pursue short-term profit by slashing costs, juicing up stock options, and outsourcing labour. What is worse, that harmful algorithm has now seized control of the collective intelligence of the giant tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Uber, that are so important in shaping our future.
“It is this hybrid artificial intelligence of today, not some fabled future artificial superintelligence, that we must bring under control,” he writes. “We need to play the game of business as if people matter.”
Financial markets as rogue AI is a startling analogy, if an obviously imperfect one. Many masters of Wall Street will doubtless dismiss the whole idea as neo-Marxist claptrap as will the libertarian wing of Silicon Valley. But that would be a pity because What’s The Future is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society. The grand hopes of the internet revolution may have been betrayed but O’Reilly challenges us to rekindle that initial idealism.
What makes O’Reilly particularly interesting is that he is both a practitioner and theoretician, an entrepreneur and a writer, who has long evangelised about the benefits of technology. His publishers may exaggerate in hailing him as the “Oracle of Silicon Valley” but he is certainly one of the most free-ranging thinkers on the West Coast. As the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, he has been teaching technology to generations of geeks for 35 years. The digerati of Silicon Valley still flock to his conferences.
Financial markets as rogue AI is a startling analogy, if an obviously imperfect one. Many masters of Wall Street will doubtless dismiss the whole idea as neo-Marxist claptrap as will the libertarian wing of Silicon Valley. But that would be a pity
Given that background, it is little surprise that O’Reilly enthuses about the ways in which free enterprise and transformative technology can improve our lives. As he notes, WTF (which more commonly stands for What The F***) can convey astonishment as much as dismay. The distinction he draws is that financial markets should be about incentivising value creation and WTFs of the positive kind, rather than value capture and WTFs of the negative version.
Unfashionably, O’Reilly defends Uber, arguing that it has brought job opportunities to thousands of drivers and is subject to private regulation by its millions of users. A one-star rating for a dangerous or abusive driver flags a problem far quicker than any traditional regulator. But he chastises the company for not putting people at the centre of its business model arguing it will be at an increasing competitive disadvantage to rivals, such as Lyft, until it does.
The final section of the book contains O’Reilly’s prescriptions for a better world: a reformed tax system to reorder financial incentives; a radically improved education system; a shift towards public benefit corporations and a focus on stuff that matters; and the smarter use of technology by governments and civil society. Sadly, almost none of this worthy checklist accords with the priorities of the Trump administration.
Overall, he is rather Pollyanna-ish about the prospects of technology creating and augmenting jobs, rather than destroying them, a contention at odds with his earlier assertions that the master algorithm is controlling our destinies. He dismisses the trendy solution of a Universal Basic Income as just a software patch on the existing system when a complete reboot is needed. But he does not imagine that much of a reboot can occur until we abandon our archaic attachment to what he calls the “divine right of capital”.
Even if its arguments are patchy, What’s The Future is 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.
The writer is the FT’s Innovation editor