WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of
dismay. In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along
with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In
this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to
action, Tim O'Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and
the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the
potential downsides of today's WTF? technologies.
What is the future when an increasing number of jobs can be
performed by intelligent machines instead of people, or done
only by people in partnership with those machines? What happens
to our consumer based societies—to workers and to the companies
that depend on their purchasing power? Is income inequality and
unemployment an inevitable consequence of technological
advancement, or are there paths to a better future? What will
happen to business when technology-enabled networks and
marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional
companies? How should companies organize themselves to take
advantage of these new tools? What’s the future of education when
on-demand learning outperforms traditional institutions? How can
individuals continue to adapt and retrain? Will the fundamental
social safety nets of the developed world survive the transition,
and if not, what will replace them?
O'Reilly is "the man who can really can make a whole industry
happen," according to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of
Alphabet (Google.) His genius over the past four decades has been
to identify and to help shape our response to emerging
technologies with world shaking potential—the World Wide Web,
Open Source Software, Web 2.0, Open Government data, the Maker
Movement, Big Data, and now AI. O’Reilly shares the techniques
he's used at O’Reilly Media to make sense of and predict past
innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a
framework for thinking about how today’s 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. He provides tools for
understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work
together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and
why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem
succeeds along with them.
The core of the book's call to action is an exhortation to
businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it
to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to
take our jobs, they say. O'Reilly replies, “Only if that’s what
we ask them to do! Technology is the solution to human problems,
and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems."
Entrepreneurs need to set their s on how they can use big
data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the
economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the
tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can
eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use
it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our
poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that
will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better
future, not just a more efficient one? Whether technology brings
the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn't inevitable. It's
up to us!