A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH
FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes
is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical
decibel... Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and
his words tumble out in a romantic cascade."
"Google's algorithms assume the world's future is nothing more than
the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this
assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it's wrong:
the future depends on human action." -- Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups,
or How to Build the Future
The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been
an awesome era. But it's coming to an end. In Life after Google, George
Gilder--the peerless visionary of technology and culture--explains why
Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as
the post-Google age dawns.
Google's astonishing ability to "search and sort" attracts the entire
world to its search engine and countless other goodies--videos, maps,
email, calendars....And everything it offers is free, or so it seems.
Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of
"aggregate and advertise" works--for a while--if you control an empire
of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship
and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads.
The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial
intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon
Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls
supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have
proved hopelessly permeable.
The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network
architecture. The future lies with the "cryptocosm"--the new
architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling
cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will
provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the
aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google.
Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a "great
unbundling," which will disperse computer power and commerce and
transform the economy and the Internet.
Life after Google is almost here.
For fans of "Wealth and Poverty," "Knowledge and Power," and "The
Scandal of Money."
