I’m a planner. I spend an inordinate amount of time looking to the future and working backwards from where I’d like to be to actions and goals that need to be set in the present. I do this for my career, for our personal finances, for the mega milestones coming in the lives of my kids…but one area I realized I have failed to take into account in my planning is the future of technology.
If you go back to someone born in 1890, they experienced a level of technological upheaval that is truly mindboggling. In a span of just over 40 years, life was transformed with phone calls supplanting letters in the mail, indoor electricity and plumbing, air conditioning, traveling by car and then plane, ATMs, microwave ovens and the first computer! By the end of their lives, many had watched men walk on the moon 240K miles away, while they could remember when a city 100 miles away might as well have been on another planet.
Technology hasn’t evolved the way many thought it might over the last 50 years (where are our hoverboards?!). Outside of mobile phones, ecommerce, and social media, someone born in the 1970’s still lives a fairly similar life to what they did when they were young. And I think that’s a large reason why we don’t factor technological change into our planning. However, there are many today that believe we are about to see a similarly dizzying pace of disruption, and not only is it coming, but the basic building blocks are already here.
I have lists and lists of books to read, so when I fixate on a topic I am typically able to go deep down the rabbit hole. That’s what happened this month, and it was an exciting and disconcerting ride. Technological life as we know it will cease to exist in the next 4-5 decades, which brings numerous pros and cons into existence. If you have read any of the books below, or if you have thoughts on some of the technologies coming, I’d love to hear them!!
Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet by Chris Dixon
Chris Dixon is a General Partner at the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. Unlike other big name VC firms in Silicon Valley, a16z, as it is affectionately known, was founded in the 2000’s by men who made their money at the beginning of the internet era. Andreesen actually invented the first wide-spread web browser, Netscape, and Horowitz is a startup founder and author of What You Do Is Who You Are, which is a fantastic book on building company culture. They are advocates of a more open web and constantly sound off on the current trend of “big tech.” Dixon is the head of a16z’s Web3 investing arm, so when I saw he had a book coming out on the blockchain, I was very excited. It’s easy to get caught up in the cryptocurrency speculation that is happening, but the blockchain itself offers the possibility of a very different internet than we experience today. Dixon spends a lot of time explaining how corporate networks have ruined what the internet was meant to be and how blockchain networks could be used to combat the control companies like Facebook and Amazon have. The argument is solid and well thought out, and it is coming from an A-list expert when it comes to Web3 and the blockchain. But there were two problems for me. First, no matter how great an argument you can make for a technology “giving power back to the people,” I can’t help but think about how selfish actors have always found a way to circumvent new technologies for profit. You just can’t look at new technologies without expecting some to go after the worst-case scenario. Second, and this really isn’t Dixon’s fault, but there is a lot of explaining basic blockchain functionality in the book. It has been 15 years since Bitcoin debuted, and 9 years since Ethereum went live. I really expected this one not to have the “intro to blockchain” content. If you have read other books on Web3, there is a decent amount of material that will be stuff you’ve already heard.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
This was as eye-opening a book as I can remember reading. AI is all the rage right now, and for good reason. It is the next technology expected to upend conventional life, and it becomes more accessible every day. You may not have heard of Mustafa Suleyman, but you may remember an interesting article back in 2016 about a DeepMind computer beating a world champion at Go. Suleyman is the cofounder of DeepMind, and while it was perhaps an amusing story to most, he says this was the moment he realized humanity was in trouble. The AI didn’t just beat a world champion human being, it did so using moves no human had ever seen before. Over just a few months of training, AI algorithms could discover new knowledge and seemingly superhuman insights. This book isn’t just about AI though. Suleyman believes there is a wave of technology coming together that includes AI, synthetic biology, robotics, quantum computing and clean energy. Some of the examples of things he believes will come are mindboggling, and while many ramifications will result in huge economic gains, there is plenty to worry about with what he calls “containment.” The book goes so far as to ponder nation states failing as governments become unable to protect their citizens from cyber attacks and the destruction these new technologies could cause. Is it overly pessimistic? Probably. But when you think how long it has taken governments to get a handle on social media, it can make you worry. I highly recommend this one just for the examples of the future world we may be looking at!
Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know IT by Kashmir Hill
I’ve not had the chance to use the Clearview AI screens at the airport, but I’ve always wondered exactly how they work. It turns out that this company has provided one of the early examples of the types of issues governments will face as new AI technology proliferates the economy. Before we knew Clearview AI as a security measure in airports, it was illegally scraping billions of pictures from the internet and providing it to law enforcement agencies as a search database for criminals. While the end-goal was positive, it represented a huge breach in privacy, and the database was being provided to literally anyone the founders thought might pay for the software. This was in clear violation of privacy laws around the world, but that didn’t stop, or even slow down, the company. Clearview was not the first company with this tool. Google actually developed something very similar and decided not to use it due to the perceived backlash. Google is not necessarily known as a “privacy-conscious” company, but this shows that there is a line in the sand that some companies are not willing to cross, and some are, and that could be dangerous. This book is part startup history and part cautionary tale, and it pairs very well with Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists by Richard P. Rumelt
Richard Rumelt is probably one of those people whose name you’d never remember, but you have undoubtedly read some of his articles. He’s considered a giant in the field of strategy based off his decades long research and career as a corporate consultant. I read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy several years ago before I had any idea who he was. The Crux builds off of that previous book, and makes a few of the same arguments about what strategy is, and what strategy is not. This book, however, is much better at tying those definitions to real world examples. Rumelt has used his research at Harvard Business School to become one of the most sought after consultants in the world, and he provides a ton of examples of how he used these principles in his work. That by itself makes the book worth reading, but he goes further in the last few chapters and actually gives you a step by step guide for how he sets up his “Strategy Foundries.” You get a guided gameplan for discovering your organizations biggest challenges and building strategies to address them from one of the world’s most renowned consultants. There is a reason that Forbes named this the top business book of 2022. I consider it a must read for business leaders.
The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert Sutton
When you follow the start-up world, you tend to hear a lot about Stanford professors. The University is inextricably linked with Silicon Valley, and, as a result, many professors have an inside look at many start-ups in the area. Bob Sutton, a B-School Professor, happens to be the author of my most favorite-titled book of all time The Asshole Survival Guide, and he threw a book out there called The No Asshole Rule for good measure. I can’t say there is anything ground-breaking in the book, but it is full of examples of how good friction and bad friction have affected businesses from start-ups to Fortune 50 members. It’s a fantastic reminder that leaders need to take time regularly to assess what type of friction is being faced by employees, customers and vendors of your company. And, while most leaders would automatically focus on eliminating bad friction, there is an emphasis on adding “good friction” to keep employees and managers from moving too quickly, and losing sight of what is trying to be accomplished or making careless mistakes.
Books for Next Month
As always, there are more terrific looking books coming out next month! Here is the list of books I’m considering. I’d love to hear any feedback you have or for you to read along with me!
Battle for the Bird: Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk and the $44 Billion Fight for Twitter’s Soul by Kurt Wagner
Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter by Zoe Schiffer
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg
Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World that Wears Us Down by Corey Keyes
Learned Excellence: Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers by Eric Potterat