WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

[Read by Fred Sanders]What do self-driving cars, on-demand services, artificial intelligence, and income inequality have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we are heading pell-mell toward a world shaped by technology in ways that we don't understand and have many reasons to fear.Tim O'Reilly, one of the most prescient observers of emerging technology, dubbed ''the Oracle of Silicon Valley'' by Inc. magazine and ''the trend spotter'' by Wired, explores the burning question of how to master the technologies we create before they master us. How do we make choices today that will result in a world we want to live in? O'Reilly applies techniques his pioneering company has used to predict and make sense of past innovation waves to provide a framework for thinking about what he calls the ''WTF technologies'' of the twenty-first century. How are these technologies changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole, and how can we shape those changes?In this powerful combination of memoir, business-strategy guide, and rallying cry, O'Reilly draws on lessons from networked platforms, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, to show how our economy and financial markets have become increasingly managed by algorithms. He believes a world ruled by machines that are hostile to humanity is not a distant possibility, and that the systems we are building today are already shaping that future.O'Reilly makes the case that income inequality, declining upward mobility, and job loss due to technology are all the result of design choices we have made in the algorithms that manage our markets and our companies. Just as Google constantly updates its algorithms in pursuit of relevant search and ad results, and as Facebook wrestles with how to rethink its algorithms for user engagement in response to fake news, O'Reilly believes we must rewrite our economic algorithms if we wish to create a more human-centered future. It's up to all of us, he argues, to ensure that the new technologies that shape tomorrow are cause not for worry, but for wonder.