Both authors have magnificent titles: Eric Schmidt as executive chairman of Google and Jared Cohen as director of Google Ideas, Google’s think tank dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions.

Although it’s usually said that never judge a book by its cover, you can’t overlook all the big names who’ve endorsed the book: Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk and Madeleine Albright.

Before digging deeper, let’s have a short look at the chapter titles. The book is arranged in seven chapters each one talking about future of something:

So at first glance, it seems that we are facing with facts from future!  Although the drawbacks of technology in different areas are not forgotten, the overall view of the book is overoptimistic about future of the technology and you can classify it as utopianistic as it is expected from directors of one of the technology giants.

In the rest of this post, I have quoted a few excerpts from every chapter. But before looking at every single chapter, here you can find some central passages of the book:

Blended facts and the missing chapter

There are many other interesting and important points discussed in the book. However, to be honest, it’s much easier to read a review than reading the book itself.

It’s full of facts and reports from many different political stories around the world. You will face with a mosaic of useless news and stories glued together with some insightful and thought-provoking passages like the ones I quoted above.

Anyone with experience of writing an elaborate report can guess that the book is written by a large group of Googlers gathering information and evidence from every source (sure google search is one of them) as the text has not the expected continuity. I’d prefer to call the book as a collected report endorsed by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Although it’s still a valuable source to know the mindset of the google and other similar technical giants.

Sure there’s a chapter missing in the book: The role of global corporations like Google in the future world. Which is not logical to suppose that it’s forgotten or discarded because of the book volume.

The Verge has published a review of the book with the following subheading:

In ‘The New Digital Age’ we learn what happens when Google stops being polite and starts getting real.

I should confess that from my point of view, it’s not far from reality. Not because of all the wills which could be substituted by woulds and coulds. But because of the clear message of the book which could be read between all the lines: The technology looks for a larger pie from the cake of power and politics.

[ Related article – Tribes: after effects of the technology and rise of the micro-media  ]

Our future selves

Reading the chapter title, you might expect a philosophical analysis of the human identity (or self-perception) affected by technology. However, the first chapter is nothing more than an appetizer.

What Schmidt and Cohen call “our future selves” is nothing more than a summary of recent technological achievements and, an optimistic account of the technology landscape in the next few decades.

Although it has some valuable clues inside, still it was more satisfying if the chapter had a more humble title (e.g., technology and our everyday life).

The Future of Revolutions

The fourth chapter of the book is divided into two distinct sections. The first part, about one-third of the content is talking about the future of revolutions in an optimistic sense.

You may even fill that the authors are supporting every single act of rebellion against the established structures. However, rest of the chapter emphasizes a very important point.

Technologies are facilitators of change, but the change is ultimately a human thing. Therefore, as authors conclude in this chapter, future revolutions are easier to start but harder to finish. Or to rephrase it in other form, revolutions are easier to happen, but the revolutionary outcomes will be harder to achieve.

Kissinger and politics of the Facebook era

As I have mentioned above, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have dedicated the fourth chapter of their book ‘The new digital age‘ to the future of revolution.

In the middle of the chapter, authors state their opinion about leading future revolutions considering the unprecedented connectivity tools provided for the rebels and opposition.

Authors believe that the technology can be a lubricating tool for starting revolutions. However, the leadership role is fundamentally different from digital herding facilitated by social networks and other new media.

Here is a passage of the book, quoting Henry Kissinger, about future of leadership in the Facebook era:

The future of states

The future of identity, citizenship, and reporting

The story of the Stuxnet (as Eric Schmidt explains)

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have dedicated the third chapter of their book, The New Digital Age, to the future of states.

One of the sections of the third chapter talks about digital provocation and cyber war.

Schmidt uses a cyber war definition offered by Richard Clarke:

Actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.

To illustrate the possibilities and the potential extents of the cyber wars, he refers to Stuxnet virus as one of the most harmful cyber warfare’s ever developed.

Here I have summarized the Schmidt’s account of the story.

The Story of Stuxnet (pp.105 – 107, 2013’s edition)

Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 and was considered the most sophisticated piece of malware ever revealed, until a virus known as Flame, discovered in 2012, claimed that title.

Designed to affect a particular type of industrial control system that ran on the Windows operating system, Stuxnet was discovered to have infiltrated the monitoring systems of Iran’s Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, causing the centrifuges to abruptly speed up or slow down to the point of self-destruction while simultaneously disabling the alarm systems.

Because the Iranian systems were not linked to the Internet, the worm must have been uploaded directly, perhaps unwittingly introduced by a Natanz employee on a USB flash drive

… Initial efforts to locate the creators of the worm were inconclusive, though most believed that its target and level of sophistication pointed to a state-backed effort.

The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as thirty people over several months.

Sure enough, it was revealed in June 2012 that not one but two governments were behind the deployment of the Stuxnet worm.

Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed to the New York Times journalist David E. Sanger that Stuxnet was a joint U.S. and Israeli project… Initially green-lit under President George W. Bush, the initiative, code-named Olympic Games, was carried into the next administration and in fact accelerated by President Obama, who personally authorized successive deployments of this cyber weapon.

After building the malware and testing it on functioning replicas of the Natanz plant built in the United States – and discovering that it could, in fact, cause the centrifuges to break apart, the U.S. government approved the worm for deployment.

… Less than a month after the public revelation about these cyber weapons, security experts at Kaspersky Lab, a large Russian computer security company with international credibility, concluded that the two teams that developed Flame and Stuxnet did, at an early stage collaborate.

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At first glance, the book may seem rather boring. Michael Bhaskar’s book, ‘Curation’,  starts with reciting trivial facts and statistics on content abundance. He refers to the vast amount of generated data, the number of daily Facebook posts, increased computational capacity, and many other similar well-known points.

But as you go further into the book, it’s a pleasant read.

To be honest, I didn’t experience any wow moment while reading this book. However,  If you are concerned with information abundance and want to think about this topic, your most creative and inspiring times will happen while you are busy reading curation.

I will dedicate a few posts to quoting author’s ideas that are worth mentioning and re-emphasizing.

The Tsunami of data

The tsunami of data is the term Bhaskar uses to describe the current state of the data economy.

In the introduction of his book, he calls the current time as the post-digital era with the following characteristics:

• Information abundance
• Pervasive connectivity
• The blurring of offline and online environments

We are conditioned for creation and growth

This is the second post he emphasizes in the introduction of the book. And the point he refers to many times in his discussions and arguments.

Bhaskar believes that we are evolved and conditioned to create more and more. The age of scarcity and hunger have conditioned us to secure tomorrow by creating more today.

But now, abundance is not a goal anymore. It has become the new challenge. The case is similar to hunger which is now substituted by obesity (at least in many parts of the world).

Here is how he defines curation:

Related articles:

• Curation and its context (the key points of the first chapter of the book)
• Curation and the overload problem
• The principles of curation

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Many scientists or university faculties have said many biased or irrelevant opinions about many things they don’t know about and may Noam Chomsky represent this group very well.

However, the case for James Watson is a bit more complicated as he states opinions which are considered as biased, sexist, and racist, and at the same time, all of his statements are directly related to his particular field of study.

The most popular quote from him that put his last years of living in the dark was about the intelligence difference between black people and the other races.

A similar statement about inherent gender differences made him more hated and left him in a situation that he mentions as “an unperson.”

These are not the only controversial ideas stated by James Watson. His statements about women’s choice on gay abortion stirred so many controversies, and even Richard Dawkins was pushed to write a letter to independent defending Wason and telling that Watson’s ideas are misrepresented by the Sunday Telegraph.

Although Dawkins put his name and fame in defending Watson, you feel that he is angry from Watson deep inside (Source):

I also remember being a little taken aback by some of the politically incorrect statements he was making. (I don’t remember specifics.) It wasn’t so bad that I felt compelled to walk out of there; I was just surprised that someone so intelligent would just say whatever came to mind with no filter whatsoever.

Despite all the above facts and controversies, still, his autobiography is one the most inspiring autobiographies you could find in the market.

Avoid boring people, is a collection of really insightful lessons from a life in science, as it is subtitled on the cover.

The name of the book is inspired by the following passage:

Never make dull speeches that easily could be delivered by someone else. Predictable words naturally compel audiences to tune out and lock their pocketbooks. Just as tedious is bringing small groups of busy people together for committee meetings with no opportunity for them to offer real input… Reading the same papers and magazines as everyone else around you is not likely to make you an interesting dinner guest, let alone alter your consciousness.

The most interesting point about the book is its unique structure.

Every single chapter is followed by a list of “remembered lessons” that an impatient reader could enjoy reading them even without the reading the whole biography.

Although the book can be an excellent source of extracting insightful quotations, I do recommend you to read it word by word and sip by sip to enjoy this unusual biography.

There are just a few sentences that I want to quote here. They caught my attention, as I believe they are describing the motivation behind his many controversial statements:

ught my attention, as I believe they are describing the motivation behind his many controversial statements:

Scientists will necessarily exaggerate but are ethically obliged to society to exaggerate responsibly. In writing my textbooks I realized that emphasizing exceptions to simple truths was counterproductive and that use of qualifying terms such as probably or possibly was not the way to get ideas across initially.

Whether you like him or hate him, he is not boring at all, and I’m sure that this makes his life satisfactory from his point of view.

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Most of us now spend a majority of our waking hours watching screens: Mobile screens, Laptop screens or TV screens.

So it’s interesting and critical to study the ways in which people think differently on the screens.

Such studies can help online marketers to influence online behavior while developing a rich body of knowledge on designing more effective choice architectures.

Shlomo Benartzi has done an excellent job in using insights from behavioral economics to explain how people respond to digital information on a screen.

He goes far beyond the shallow popular criticisms of the new technologies and tries to analyze the ways by which these technologies affect our behavior and our economies.

Attention scarcity is the first result of the new digital gadgets. An important concern that Benartzi expresses using a famous quote from Noble-prize winner Herbert Simon:

In the world of screens, the first impression is one of the most powerful shaping forces in managing attention flow, a critical point that should be seriously considered by digital designers as well as authors.

The book is rich in collecting and reporting fascinating research showing how our mind processes information in the new digital world. A world that is full of digital screens and people who are craving for the fastest and easiest way to receive and digest information.

The smarter screen somehow reminds me the theme of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.

The irrational humans of the physical world have found a new place to live and evolve their long-lived irrationality.

As a reader who is interested in content strategy, the core message of the book can be stated as follows:

In the world of endless possibilities for finding the desired content, better curators would have a greater chance of success. In other words:

While the last decade was belonging to search engine specialists, the content curators would reign the next decade.

About the authors

Schlomo Benartzi is a leading behavioral economist and faculty member of UCLA Anderson School of Management.

He serves as Chief Scientist for the California Digital Nudge Initiative and has also worked for many financial institutions.

Although Shlomo Benartzi has addressed Jonah Lehrer as his collaborator, as publisher mentioned the name of Jonah Lehrer with a far smaller type size on the cover, it may look safe to consider Shlomo Benartzi as the main author of the book.

However, in my opinion, after it was revealed that he has fabricated some quotes in his bestselling book Imagine (2012), may publisher has decided to understate his contribution to protect the credibility of the book.

It’s worth mentioning that as a reader of Lehrer’s instructive and inspiring books, I believe that the publishing industry has gone too far in penalizing his misdeed.

Other details about this book

Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC

Publication Date: 06/10/2015

ISBN13: 9780349410395

Number of Pages: 256

Smarter Screen in Amazon

Smarter Screen in Barnes and Noble

P.S.: I have photographed the cover of my version of the book. However, there’s another cover designed for the book by S-T which I believe communicates the message of the book more clearly:

The post Book Review: The Smarter Screen (By Shlomo Benartzi and Jonah Lehrer) appeared first on webmindset.

Up to now, The Automatic Customer and Oversubscribed (written by Daniel Priestly) are the best books I’ve found in the market dedicated to subscription revenue model. However, there’s a significant difference in the approaches of these two books.

The automatic customer is a categorized case study collection showing you various successful businesses using subscription business model. But oversubscribed takes a strategic design approach. So instead of reviewing different success cases, the book emphasizes on the mindset, values and infrastructures that can help you in building and growing a successful subscription based business.

So instead of reviewing different success cases, the book emphasizes on the mindset, values and infrastructures that can help you in building and growing a successful subscription based business.

Here you can find the some of the insightful ideas of the oversubscribed book:

• To become oversubscribed, you have to separate yourself from the market.
• To separate yourself from the market, there are four choices available which are called four drivers of market imbalance by Daniel Priestly:
  • Being innovative
  • Building differentiating relationships
  • being the most convenient option
  • Using price as a differentiative factor
• Building campaigns and promoting your business is not an option. It’s a must.
• A campaign is not a collection of push messages promoting your products. It can be even a unique approach to the product delivery process.

For a person who works in the digital marketplace, most of the points mentioned in the book may seem clear and not-so-new.

However, besides a roadmap for novice marketers, it can be a considered as a comprehensive and practical checklist for professionals.

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Still there are many books and business scholars who consider the subscription as a revenue model and not a business model, although John Warrillow’s book is not one of them.

Considering subscription as a revenue model means you can design your core product and even most of the internal functions of your business without taking the effect of the subscription model to your core idea.

John Warrillow is one of the rare cases who considers the subscription as a core component of the identity of a business. He even coined his own term for the subscription-based business models: Businesses with Automatic Customers!

The first part of his book has an exciting title: Subscribers are better than customers.

The title has an implicit yet clear message: subscribers are not a type of customer; they are something different and even better.

Although most books consider the subscription business model as a pure and non-dividable business model, Warrillow divides the subscription business model into nine distinct categories:

• The Membership Website Model
• The All-You-Can-Eat Library Model
• The Private Club Model
• The Front-of-the-Line Model
• The Consumables Model
• The Surprise Box Model
• The Simplifier Model
• The Network Model
• The Peace-of-Mind Model

It’s not so easy to find any other text visualizing the structure of the subscription economy better than The Automatic Customer.

A highly recommended book for any startup and should be filed under No Excuse for anyone who is thinking about starting an online business.

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I have mentioned his name in my list of leading thinkers of the technology. He is one of the few scientists you can indisputably call them a futurist.

The Author of the book Singularity is near, after discussing so many different technological trends in his previous book, here is going to show the roadmap of creating something superior to the human mind.

The most significant challenge Ray Kurzweil faces is trying to reverse engineer the mind.

In the last centuries, philosophers and metaphysic-believers have lost the brain ground in the battle with scientists and have accepted that the brain is part of the biologist’s territory. However, the mind is still considered by them and many other people with biased-scientists as something beyond an embodied cognition.

There are still many people who are not able (or willing) to accept consciousness as an emerging property of a complex system and prefer to consider it as a separate entity infused in the body of the living entities.

Therefore, you may see many objections to the book that are trying to protect their comfort zone even under the scientific cloak.

Here is the table of contents of How to create a mind:

Kurzweil states in the preface of the book that reverse engineering of the mind is the most important project in the universe.

In his book, he tries to apply pattern recognition knowledge to analyzing the brain function. He calls this process as Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind (PRTM).

Here’s the focal point of the criticisms of his book: Whether it’s the most appropriate approach to reverse engineering the mind or Kurzweil tries to see the brain as a nail just because The hammer is the only tool he has in hand?

In my opinion, the book is insightful enough to dismiss these criticisms and justify reading it and thinking about it.  Considering the fact that if we expect that every scientist approaches the problems with the tools he is not equipped with (!), then we are entering the territory of philosophy and metaphysics and all the superstitions which have been around for centuries. 

From Kurzweil’s point of view in How to create a mind, the latest evolved part of the brain (Neocortex) is functioning like a hierarchical pattern recognition system, and this is what distinguishes it from the old reptilian brain.

Here we can have the new definitions of the existing mind-related terms:

• Neocortex: a multilayer perceptron (with multiple layers of neurons) receiving sensory inputs and each layer combines the signals and passes them to the next layer (Part of them which are greater than some threshold value). Assumption: next layers can send back signals and adjust triggering threshold of the previous layers.
• Memory: a list of patterns that can be recalled with specific triggers. This lists of patterns are somehow interpolation of the past and a tool for extrapolating the future.
• Learning: Pattern recognition in different levels of the hierarchy. This model can justify why we are not able to deeply understand multi-layer concept simultaneously.
• Misunderstanding: Trying to transfer patterns stored in my mind to yours or using my pattern classification system to understand your sensory data of stored information.
• Directed Thinking: Aligning the whole pattern recognition system with the current problem on the table.
• Undirected Thinking: Leaving the patterns to interact with each other and probably re-classified to reach to a new pattern. Undirected thinking has a major contribution to the evolution of the mind.

Besides all appraisals and criticisms, how to create a mind is worth reading and thinking. It’s one of the greatest manifests of the transhumanism trying to go further than appealing inflated slogans.

Quotations from introduction of the book – How to create a mind

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“The structure of the social licking network among cows is one of the best patterns for understanding and predicting the network structure of interaction among U.S. senators”.

Considering above fact and other similar researches reported by Nicholas Christakis in his book titled connected, would not be surprising when he tells us that the obesity or mood is a contagion property in human networks.

Christakis, a professor of social and natural science at Yale, was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the world in 2009.

If Christakis and James Fowler had to choose another title for their book, most probably they would choose Contagious instead of Connected. The whole book concentrates on the contagious effect of the human attributes, moods and behaviors in the networks.

According to their reports, a variety of individuals’ attributes like obesity, smoking, and happiness are not individualistic behaviors as we thought before and are seriously correlated – and even caused – by our connections with other people.

Contagious effect of the mood and behavior is not something new. However, social networks have provided a better means for transmitting these attributes compared to traditional traditional face-to-face and personal communications. Christakis calls this feature as the long-distance contagious property of the social networks.

At the early years of the web, the Six degrees of separation was the famous story everywhere. Reading the connected book, you would be convinced that the social networks have a more amazing story now: The three degrees of influence:

Our influence gradually dissipates and eases to have noticeable effect on people beyond the special frontier that lies at three degrees of separation. We are generally influenced by friends within 3 degree but general not by those beyond.

The book has an evolutionary point of view in describing the emotional contagion: I am happier when you are happy, and I feel sad because you are so. In the process of evolution, we have learned to mimic others’ emotions outwardly, and this outward mimicking have led us to adopt the others’ internal states.

Although this process helped us in the development of emotional empathy, the same capability has become a threat to us in today’s complicated network-rich hyperconnected world.

The book’s message is clear and important: We no longer dominate the territory of our feelings and emotions. Not only my direct friends in the network have a non-neglectable contribution in my mood, but also my friend’s friends have a great influence on my feeling and emotions.

In the age of hyperconnectedness, feeling lonely can be totally different from being alone, as the feeling of loneliness can be induced unconsciously by the people I am connected with. Therefore, the most control we have, is choosing the people we are connected, and this is the decision most of us have left to the random suggestions of the social applications!

Related Link: A PDF file from the book excerpts provided by the authors

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The publishing industry is in crisis. It always has been. The publishing itself won’t go away as it is one of the major accomplishments of the humans in the whole history. But even if publishing itself survives, the publishers may vanish if they fail to adapt themselves to the new digital age.

The viewpoint mentioned above has been the Michael Bhaskar’s motivation for writing his groundbreaking book titled The Content Machine.

There would be no way to analyse the current state of the publishing industry or predict its future, without looking at the trends of this industry in the last centuries.

Such a trend analysis is not easy for this industry as no one has a clear definition of publishing. May it be better to say: no one had a clear definition. Because reading Michael Bhaskar’s book would show you that the claim stated on the front cover is true. His book is a major step towards a theory of publishing. Something that covers the whole history of publishing from the printing press to the digital network.

The traditional definition of publishing is to make something public. However making something public in the digital era is much easier and cheaper than before. Therefore, publishers have to find a new role in the new age considering the old competencies.

Despite many people who believe that publishing industry is and has been an old-fashioned traditional industry, Michael Bhaskar believes that publishers have been frontiers of education and development for centuries, and it would not be so hard to hold this position if they try to adapt themselves to the changes.

In the digital age with so many free and easy-to-use high reach digital channels, everyone can be a micro-publisher. So the traditional publishers have to create and deliver more value to survive in the new economy.

Bhaskar has a recommendation there: Publishers have to find the audience and develop the market for the content. This is the service that every content owner and micropublisher would crave for.

Till now, advertisers were believed to have such a role. However, reaching the audience in the world of content overflow is something much more sophisticated than copywriting and selling channels. It seems advertisers themselves have to redefine their role to be able to defend their territory in the new age.

Michael Bhaskar has a three-part solution for the publishing challenge: Publishers have to filter the content and choose the ones with the best quality. Then they have to frame it in a digestible format for the content consumers, and the last and most important part of their mission is to amplify the content to be heard in the current noisy world of digital content which not every voice is heard by the audience.

Here you can find a summary of Michael Bhaskar’s theory of publishing in the digital age: Filtration, Framing & Amplification (Pdf format)

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As they tell us, there’s only one barrier on the way to the technology paradise: There are still so many disconnected people and societies all around the globe. This is the reason that Zuckerberg, Schmidt, Musk and other leaders of technology, always talk about universal access to the web as one of the fundamental human rights in the digital age.

As a technology-lover but a non-believer in these too-optimistic views, I was never convinced the technology itself can be a liberating tool for human.

I’ve always considered the technology at its best as a new evolutionary tool. Every evolutionary tool will provide us with new possibilities. But as evolution is blind in its nature, it bundles construction and destruction together to find the best way toward the next stage of the development.

With all these pre-assumptions, sure it was delightful for me to see the Andrew Keen‘s new book titled: The Internet Is Not The Answer.

His book could be considered in the category of the other internet critics like Nicholas Carr and Ethan Zuckerman. But reading the book, felt like talking with a traditional left-winger economist.

Besides discussing so many facets of the new digital era such as user tracking and data collection and behavioral analysis, the main emphasis of the book is about the effects of this new wave on the current economy. The spirit of the book would remind you of the times when the first robots were installed in the factories and many analysts and futurists were talking about a robotic apocalypse and the future world with no room for the jobless workers.

Yes. As he states many times in his book, an open decentralized technology will not be naturally translated into a less hierarchical or unequal society. But this equal classless society has never been our expectation from the digital technology and the web.

Here’s the main statement of Andrew Keen: The internet is not the answer to our problems. It’s even cause of many of them.

I still like the title of his book: The internet is not the answer. But it’s not even the central question. It’s a tool. It’s a very small mutation for human gene and now as John Perry Barlow says humans are able to experience a real spiritual experience without the necessity of sacrificing their hearts and souls for the old age temples.

Every advancement of the technology, including internet, are just extensions of the hands and minds of the humans and nothing more.

There’s no inherent positive promise or negative consequence in the web or any other technology. Sure there are always extremist ideas about every new tool or technology. Some will try to convince us that we are on the road to hell and some others will promise us the paradise.

But as there is no target point to reach for, every new tool would help our species to adapt itself to the environment better than before and nothing more. Although this adaptation would not be free and painless.

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