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 Warehouse by Rob Hart

THE WAREHOUSE by Rob Hart is a new work of dystopian science fiction which is a LibraryReads selection for August. Set in the near future at a MotherCloud facility where employees live, eat, play and work for credits, there is some corporate espionage underway. Zinnia has been secretly recruited to find the source of the complex’s power and Paxton is a prison security guard and inventor whom she meets on the first day. Much of their orientation is delivered through videos and everyone wears a shirt that reflects their job – red for pickers (order processors), blue for security, green for maintenance, white for managers and so forth.  Work shifts and timing are all controlled centrally – communicated through smart watches called CloudBands which are activated with a fingerprint and track their wearer’s movements, making Zinnia’s task very challenging. Despite the opportunities - cool air, fresh water, a job and place to live - available through Cloud, the atmosphere is menacing; an associate of Paxton’s remarks, “you’ll see there’s the Cloud way of doing things and the right way of doing things. Sometimes those are the same, sometimes they aren’t.” Gibson Wells is the industrialist who heads the company, the monopolist who has overtaken tons of small businesses (including Paxton’s), and corporate lobbyist who has helped push through legislation like the Red Tape Elimination Act and FAA takeover. As Hart indicates in his acknowledgements, this is a thriller with a message about opportunity and about income inequality, essentially an attempt, he hopes, that “nudges us in the right [future] direction.” THE WAREHOUSE received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Watch also for the forthcoming movie from Ron Howard and Imagine Entertainment.

A People's Future of the United States and The Good Immigrant

A PEOPLE'S FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES edited by Victor Lavalle and John Joseph Adams contains “Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers.”  And many of the contributors are indeed award winners and easily recognizable for their longer fiction, such as Charlie Jane Anders (All the Birds in the Sky) to Gabby Rivera (Juliet Takes a Breath) to Daniel H. Wilson (The Clockwork Dynasty).   Several of the stories are over 20 pages and they all respond to a prompt asking the writers to explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice in new futures.   

In his “No Algorithms in the World” Hugh Howey, for example, writes about a world with guaranteed personal income and the tension between generations over the definition of work.  It is a society where “data” collection and manipulation can have a stultifying effect: “It’s like the time my wife and I found out we were having a kid because of new food combos she was grabbing out of the pantry and fridge. Our house just up and bought flowers one day to congratulate us.”  The subsequent selection, “Esperanto” by Jamie Ford, explores the concept of beauty – whether machine generated or more natural with all of its imperfections.   

These tales of human-machine interface (inter-dependence?) are eerily similar to societal changes that Kate Klonick reflects upon in “‘Creepy’ Assignment: Pay Attention to What Strangers Reveal in Public” in this week’s New York Times. I wonder what other connections our students would make?  A PEOPLE'S FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES received starred reviews from both Booklist and Publishers Weekly.

THE GOOD IMMIGRANT, edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman, is another collection of stories and essays wherein “26 Writers Reflect on America.” The writing is as equally powerful as its striking cover. This is a text which will make readers think.  In particular “How to Write Iranian-American, or The Last Essay” by Porochista Khakpour conjures images and emotions: “It did not take me long to discover that we were all absolutely and mercilessly united by our ambitions to stay afloat on our parents’ dreams – the American Dream. We were, after all, the good immigrants.” 

This collection offers a wide choice of writing styles and experiences related to immigration and since this title was featured recently on NPR, teachers have proactively been asking about it. Our Global Voices students will find this collection especially compelling; they already read Teju Cole (Open City) who is one of the better known contributors here. THE GOOD IMMIGRANT follows a 2016 UK edition; this American version received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.