More Business Books ... looking to the future, learning from the past

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE from Harvard Business Review Press is part of a series which also has texts dealing with Blockchain and Cybersecurity. This one, on artificial intelligence (AI) points out that companies that wait to adopt may never catch up and suggests some questions that ALL employees should be able to answer: How does AI work? What is it good at? And what should it never do? The contributors’ experience and background range from academicians (at University of Toronto, MIT, Stanford) to practitioners (at Facebook, Accenture, and more). One, Andrew Ng, currently CEO of Landing AI and who has worked for Baidu, Coursera, and Google Brain describes how to choose your first AI project.  Others write about collaborative intelligence as humans and AI join forces or about the future of using far less data, developing efficient robot reasoning with less reliance on deep learning from patterns. Each essay or reprinted article ends with a useful “takeaways” section. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE focuses on a topic which is highly interesting for many of our students and offers varied perspectives so that our business faculty could choose to incorporate a few selections (e.g., about ethics, bias and lack of transparency or about AI’s varied impact on work) for class readings.

As you may know, we currently have school-based subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And on Friday both of those papers had stories about comments from Brad Smith. The New York Times said, “Microsoft Corp President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said on Friday that technology companies are likely to change how they moderate online platforms in response to new laws from foreign governments, regardless of whether U.S. lawmakers act to change … U.S. law …” And The Wall Street Journal also discussed ethical issues while mentioning the new book, TOOLS AND WEAPONS by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. It contains a foreword by Bill Gates where he describes this book as “a clear, compelling guide to some of the most pressing debates in technology today.” Smith and Browne subtitled their book “The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age” and they do not shy away from relating events and raising issues associated with Snowden and diplomacy, with facial recognition and artificial intelligence and with social media, surveillance, or personal privacy. As reflected in the duality of the title, TOOLS AND WEAPONS prompts many questions about the concentration of power in corporations (e.g., amount of energy used to power machines) and in governments (e.g., relative to political activism and human rights).

Get informed for these key discussions – and please see a librarian or our ClassLinks page for help activating your digital newspaper subscriptions.  

 

Also of high interest to students will be THAT WILL NEVER WORK by Marc Randolph which deals with “The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea.” Of course, so many students are regular Netflix users and while they will relate to today’s product, they will likely find the company’s transformation over time to be surprising.  In particular, it will be valuable for them to see the frequent fails (such as never realizing the Blockbuster merger) or near failures (deficits and layoffs) that occurred prior to Netflix becoming the force it is today. Hopefully, it is also stimulating for them to think about the process of idea generation (and rejection or modification) as well as needed research on market needs, trends and competition.  Randolph, who co-founded Netflix, also has extensive experience in the entrepreneurship sphere in Silicon Valley.  He writes with an often amusing, very conversational tone, providing in THAT WILL NEVER WORK an inside look at many of the decisions and efforts to adapt as the company moved forward.

The Fate of Food by Little and Falter by McKibben

Here are some comments on two newer books which independently use “bleak” to describe a possible future.

THE FATE OF FOOD by Amanda Little, a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University, is subtitled “What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.” In over a dozen chapters, she explores some really interesting – and disruptive – ideas like Impossible Meat product development and research into why humans crave meat. The CEO of Impossible Meats says, “our mission is to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035, which we will certainly do.”  Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but starting next week the Impossible Burger will be available at every Burger King. Amanda Little’s research about our changing food supply led her to conduct interviews in a dozen countries and around the United States and she includes black and white photographs in this text. That helps envision some of these technologies and how wide-spread they could become.  Little deftly explains changes in agriculture, threats to the water supply, and evolving production processes like vertical farming.  For a quick overview, listen to Terry Gross’ interview with her on NPR’s Fresh Air. Notes and an index comprise about fifteen percent of THE FATE OF FOOD which received a starred review from Kirkus.

FALTER by Bill McKibben is a new non-fiction work by the activist author of the more fanciful Radio Free Vermont. Thirty years after publishing The End of Nature about global warming, McKibben combines his long-standing concern about Earth’s environment with apprehension about the increasing influence of technology (especially artificial intelligence and genetic engineering) in our lives. In FALTER he argues that “we’re simply so big, and moving so fast, that every decision carries enormous risk.” In the first section, Size of the Board, McKibben looks at ways that “privilege lies in obliviousness,” how we have distanced ourselves from nature, and how we already have losses due to a changing climate (e.g., “winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down.”) In a section titled Leverage, he looks at shifts in ideology involving profit-seeking and race-baiting, the short-term outlook and lack of human solidarity. His philosophical comments are interspersed with data and statistics (e.g., on establishing solar panels) and, thus, FALTER is a rather involved call to action. McKibben argues that “we have the tools (nonviolence chief among them) to allow us to stand up to the powerful and the reckless.” He has “walked the talk” by founding the environmental organization 350.org and offers in his latest work an updated, but at times, meandering treatise which is both alarming and hopeful. Approximately ten percent of FALTER is devoted to notes and an index. FALTER received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly and appears in The Washington Post list of “40 new books that tell America’s Story.”