Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility by David Weinberger (PDF)

Description

Make. More. Future.Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we’ve allowed ourselves to see.Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it’s revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing–and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses.Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do–but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games. We even take for granted that a simple hashtag can organize unplanned, leaderless movements such as #MeToo.Through stories from history, business, and technology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted–and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book’s imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future.The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Weinberger has given us a beautifully written set of mental maps to help keep us aligned with our own futures.” — KMWorldAdvance Praise for Everyday Chaos:Seth Godin, author, This Is Marketing–“My copy is filled with notes on the margins of every page. This is what books are for–a mind-blowing, game-changing, fun-to-read race into the future. Wow.”Reid Hoffman, cofounder, LinkedIn; Partner, Greylock–“If you want to better understand the possibilities that machine learning and other forms of AI are creating–and harness the power of these breakthroughs–read this lively and illuminating book!”Aneesh Chopra, former (and first) US Chief Technology Officer, Obama Administration–“Weinberger’s thought-provoking call to action is a must-read for business leaders pushing the envelope on innovation, for policy makers seeking to protect the public from undue harm, and for the rest of us who are keen to live better lives but mindful of any unintended consequences.”Robin Chase, cofounder and former CEO, Zipcar–“David’s writing is just so pleasing, and his ideas so interesting and useful, that I found myself reveling in his words, nudging my partner and saying, ‘Let me read you this bit . . . ‘”Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab–“With classic Weinberger wit and brilliant insight, this book shatters the myth of predictability while delivering grounded, actionable advice for anyone trying to thrive in the everyday chaos that has become our world. A page-turner must-read for everyone.” About the Author From the earliest days of the web, David Weinberger has been a pioneering thought leader about the internet’s effect on our lives, on our businesses, and most of all on our ideas. He has contributed to areas ranging from marketing and libraries to politics and journalism as a strategic marketing VP and consultant, an internet adviser to presidential campaigns, an early social-networking entrepreneur, a writer-in-residence at Google, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department, and a philosophy professor. His writing has appeared in publications from Wired to Harvard Business Review, and his books include the bestselling The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐‘Deep Patient’ is a type of ‘artificial intelligence’. It is artificial because it is a type of machine learning, and machines know nothing about what data represents. All they can do is find relationships among millions of pieces of data. Deep Patient could discover that a particular patient being treated by her doctor has a 72% chance of developing schizophrenia, a diagnosis that would be an impossible task for a doctor. It would require internalizing millions of points and each of their connections and weightings, to arrive at the same conclusion. This would be an unimaginable task for any human being, let alone one with a waiting room full of patients to attend to.That 11 by 5-centimetre cell phone in your pocket is a navigation system, can handle type-ahead predictions, language translation, music recommendations, and much more. You are already relying on machine learning.A professor of philosophy memorably told me when I was a graduate student that any society that doesn’t respect both its philosophers and its plumbers, will find that neither its ideas nor pipes hold water. This book is philosophical: it is intended for plumbers and the CEO’s of multinational plumbing parts manufacturers.Our imperfect knowledge about the world has for centuries rested on the assumption that if we work hard enough and think clearly enough, the universe will yield its secrets. It won’t, and it cannot: there isn’t a box of secret rules.That does not mean we cannot act intelligently: we can and must. However, the fundamentals of our thinking and decision making must change in the light of the chaos we now experience and are beginning to understand and internalise.That insight is the profound value of this book. The volume of data and information that we can access, is immense beyond all possible comprehension. This leads to the conclusion that the “true complexity of the world far outstrips the laws and models we devise to explain it.”In an age as chaotic and unpredictable as this, strategy should be more important than ever. It is, but only if we adapt how we think about strategy, profoundly.As long ago as the Socratic era, strategy was understood as finding tricks to get one out of one’s military (or business) funk. Odysseus, for example, ended the Trojan War through the ‘strategy’ of stuffing warriors into a gift wooden horse. I hear much the same underlying request from many people who engage me in my work as a strategist.To understand strategy as ‘planning for the long-term’, requires a future that’s orderly and predictable enough for it to make sense. To varying degrees and in different ways, this would require that the strategy enables the company to narrow the possibilities down to the ones that the company is going to pursue.The complexity required of this linear type of thinking, inspired a very different approach to strategy making—scenario planning. In a scenario process, managers invent and then consider, in depth, several stories of equally plausible futures for the business. While this is undoubtedly helpful in opening minds to a variety of possibilities, it is limited by a view of the world that is wrong. It is fundamentally too simplistic. No matter how sophisticated and complex the linear thinking, the world does not have a rule structure.In her book, (reviewed in 2014 in this column,) ‘Transient Advantage: The End of Competitive Advantage’, Professor Rita McGrath debunks Michael Porter’s idea that you can ever have a “sustainable competitive advantage”. Just ask any inventor of a now defunct piece of technology. Rather she promotes a “strategy of continuous reconfiguration”.This understanding requires that companies must be alerted to changes anywhere in their environment. They must have in place an organizational structure and culture that enables them to respond by disengaging from the current trajectory, to creating a new one. This is a 180-degrees flip from the outdated view of strategy as a lengthy plan, leading into an essentially knowable future.Scenario planning looks for planet-scale changes, whereas McGrath’s approach is to be aware of small changes. This is a more appropriate response to the delicate interrelationship of every aspect of life, any bit of which might affect our business terminally, or at best give it an economic limp.This alertness to possibilities is one example of the response for a business to a changed view of the way the world works. There is no end of implications for other areas of understanding and decision making.If you need to be reminded of the insights of this book, you only need to think of the tiny pebble that hit your windshield and shattered it. Energy can come from tiny changes distributed throughout the system, if the system is large, complex, and densely connected enough.The title of the book comes from “Chaos Theory”. This theory provides mathematical tools for modelling highly complex, nonlinear systems, making it possible to rigorously analyse everything from the flow of water around a boulder, to climate change. Altering one element can have surprising and dramatic effects on entire enmeshed systems, just like the tiny pebble on your windscreen.Behavioural economics demonstrated just how irrational we are in our behaviour and changed economic thinking, so must ‘everyday chaos’ thinking change our understanding of strategy and our business decisions.We need to lose our naive confidence that we can understand how things happen, or that we can we can make things happen by pulling the right levers. It is far more complex than that, as this fascinating book explains.Readability Light —+- SeriousInsights High +—- LowPractical High +—- Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on strategy and implementation and is the author of ‘Strategy that Works’ and ‘The Executive Update.

⭐This David Weinberger book brings us up to date on his thinking. Weinberger has been a prophet for the value of the Internet for decades, and in this book he confesses that it isn’t all good–that the voices of the ‘Net haven’t changed the world in the way he imagined they might. Commerce got the jump on us.Still, his explorations of machine learning suggest a new, realistic kind of optimism. It forces us to face uncertainty, to accept that we know very little, and to feel awe. Bravo for his honesty and continued reading of the future and thinking about our present. He offers a whole world view, about getting older as well as confronting the vastness of computer generated learning and the use of vast conglomerations of data.

⭐Machine learning means that organizations can now make predictions that humans can’t entirely explain. Is this a bad thing? And what are the implications of such a world?This is a fascinating book based on the key premise and questions above. Rife with interesting examples and cited research, Weinberger’s relatively short book belies its remarkably ambitious scope: Another fifty pages of so would have paid off in spades.

⭐The book puts you in a position where you will see how complex it will be to do the next steps. Not the steps just ahead of us, but further away.

⭐Very compelling thesis supported by a series of wonderful essays about how we’ve got machine learning but in so doing give up explainability about how the AI made a decision or computed a result.

⭐As David Weinberger suggests, “The aim of this book is to reveal a shift that explains many of the changes around us in business, our personal lives, and our institutions…to examine the before and after these changes in particular domains of our lives, even though in most instances we have not yet reached the full ‘after’…[while] we are living through a deep change in our understanding of ourselves and our world.”As I worked my way through Weinberger’s narrative — one that more resembles an obstacle course (or a mental minefield) than it does a yellow brick road — I realized that many of my ideas about how the world works are based on assumptions that are either obsolete or flat-out wrong. Weinberger cites these: events occur according to laws; it is possible to understand what happens…also why; events can be made to happen by pulling levers; and finally, change is proportional to effect or impact. “As we inch away from each of these four assumptions, perhaps our everyday understanding of how things happen is finally catching up with the way the world actually works, and how scientists have been thinking about it for a while now.” (page 11)Weinberger goes on to suggest that “we are beginning to see the factors that determine what happens are so complex, so difficult, and so dependent on the finest-grained particularities of situations that to understand them we have had to turn them into stories far simpler than the phenomena themselves.”In order to control this new paradox, we must first understand it. And I suspect, as Socrates once observed, the more we understand about the world, the more we realize how much we don’t understand.These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Weinberger’s coverage:o Mount Sinai Hospital’s Deep Patient (Pages 1-2)o How We Think Things Happen (8-11 and 53-55)o Prediction’s Sweet Spot (20-25)o Conceptual Models, Working Models (41-43)o Beyond Explanation: Machine Learning Working Model (53-62)o Modes of Unanticipation (79-93)o An Agile Approach to Unpredictable(83-85)o Platforms of Unanticipation (85-93)o Coda: Libraries of Unanticipation (97-100 and 104-107)o Interoperability Is the New Causality (109-119 and 139-142)o Progress (112-113, 147-148, 151-154, 157-159, and 160-163)o Possibility (123-144)o The Shape of Surprise (160-163)o Coda: What We learn from Things (163-167)o Morality and Meaning (181-189 and 189-192)I read this book immediately after reading another, Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, brilliantly edited by John Brockman. I agree with him that “artificial Intelligence is today’s story — the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: good AI versus evil AI.”One of the 25 contributors, Daniel D. Dennett, asserts that we don’t need conscious agents with whom to collaborate on AI initiatives. We need intelligent tools. He agrees with Norbert Wiesner that the real danger with AI is “that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically.””So what we are creating,” he adds, ” are not — should not be — conscious humanoid agents but an entirely new sort of entity, rather like oracles, with no conscience, no fear of death, no distracting loves and hates, no personality (but all sorts of foibles and quirks that would no doubt be identified as the ‘personality’ of the system): boxes of truths (if we’re lucky) almost certainly contaminated with a scattering of falsehoods. It will be hard enough learning with them without distracting ourselves with fantasies about the Singularity in which these AIs will enslave us, literally. The human use of human beings will soon be changed — once again — forever, but we can take the tiller and steer between some of the hazards if we take responsibility for our trajectory.”I agree with Dennett and Weinberger: Whether “everyday chaos” is creatively destructive or constructive — inherently negative or positive — is for us to determine.I presume to include this digression because I see several potentially significant learning opportunities to involve AI as we struggle to understand “further beyond our understanding than we’ve let ourselves believe.” Thank you, David Weinberger, for putting white caps on gray matter. Everyday Chaos is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!

⭐Well organised and written with a touch of humour presenting a complex subject (AI/ML/DL) in a clear and interesting manner. Excellent read! Everyone who works with or uses tech should read this!

⭐Well written, clear and with lots of examples. Will change the way you think about a connected world.

⭐Excellent read

⭐It is difficult to review a work as diverse as this, yet deep in its discussion. It is not an overstatement to say that I highlighted sections within almost every page and went back to consider these sections as new perspectives unfolded.

⭐I ordered and paid for a hardcover version but received a soft-covered “advance reader’s copy”. I thought it was strange. Can’t yet comment on the content: I haven’t started reading it 🙂

Keywords

Free Download Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility in PDF format
Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility PDF Free Download
Download Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility 2019 PDF Free
Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility 2019 PDF Free Download
Download Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility PDF
Free Download Ebook Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility