WTF?

Can we master the technologies we create before they master us? A “punchy and provocative” assessment by one of Silicon Valley’s sharpest observers (Financial Times).

WTF? can be an expression of amazement or of dismay—and today’s technology elicits both reactions. In this book, Tim O’Reilly, dubbed “the Oracle of Silicon Valley” by Inc. magazine, explores the upsides—and 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 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 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 former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and for decades he’s identified and helped shape our response to emerging technologies with world-shaking potential—from the World Wide Web to Big Data and AI. Here, he shares the techniques he’s used at O’Reilly Media to anticipate innovation waves and provides a framework for thinking about how current innovations are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He helps us understand how the parts of digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.

O’Reilly exhorts 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.” Whether technology brings the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn’t inevitable. It’s up to us.

“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.” —Financial Times

“WTF? is a book about technology as it was, as it is, and as it could be. It is told from the perspective of someone who has been personally present at the most important moments in the fast-paced history of tech, and who played a significant role in those moments . . . Please do read this book.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing