When I picked up this book I had expected (in Peter’s own words) a cult-like techo-optimist rambling about the amazing new technologies coming our way. Me being more of a techno-pessimist, I was hesitant. Luckily I opened the book and saw these nice little charts, these convinced me so I bought it.
My first impression was of course wrong. I’m going to say it outright: for me this book is one of the most interesting collections of ideas I’ve ever come across. I thought I had a pretty good view on how the world really works (which is bleak) but this book proved me wrong. My view was outdated it seems.
I think this book will age like fine wine, the more time goes by, the more it will prove right. Just the 2 years after this book has been released have strengthened that notion. I also liked his writing style, neutral and with a slight tint of humor where appropriate.
These were the paragraphs that won me over:
“Scary to think how these ‘new’ technologies have become ‘normal’, stale and uninspiring. Social, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data: Boooooring”
I’ve also always found them boring.
“... But, let’s face it, talks on social media tend to be about as exciting as the proverbial paint drying process. ...”
“... Social, Mobile, Big Data and Cloud went from ‘hot’ to ‘mainstream’ to ‘tedious’ in record time. They have become the ‘Nexus of Meh’. To think that, a few years ago, data scientists were called ‘the new rock stars’. Poor guys. Back to being nerds. Oh well.”
Glad mr. Hinssen put those topics out of the way from the get go. Me having played (multiplayer) videogames since I was 8 knew what a server was and for the longest time I thought of the Cloud as a glorified collection of servers. I once sat in the audience of a presentation from Microsoft about Cloud gaming. I remember us aspiring Game Developers (and also avid gamers) to be unimpressed. We knew latency was going to make Microsoft’s cloud gaming plans fall apart.
Sometimes these cloud solutions really get in the way of videogames. When bare metal private servers for vanilla World of Warcraft can handle hundreds of players just fine but Blizzards own World of Warcraft virtual cloud-based servers choke on just a hundred players, then we know there is a problem ...
But the mistake I made was to extrapolate my lack of enthusiasm to technologies like Deep Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, blockchain and Internet of Things. Especially that last one sounded so silly to my ears I never even did the effort to research it properly. This book has convinced me that these technologies will probably have a much bigger impact than I thought.
I had been lulled in the false notion that the biggest technological advances had been made 20 years ago or earlier (internet, computers, ...) and that now we were incrementally improving them. Just like Robert J. Gordon thought, with many shiny things like social media and Pokemon Go. But mr. Hinssen reconvinced me that technology is still picking up speed and that it’s going faster and faster. Especially his linear vs exponential model with the deception phase really put things into perspective. It’s so deceptively simple too, but it’s an art to bring your ideas in the most simple manner. One which Peter has mastered it seems.
While I’m still of the opinion that hand-writing the code for AI is never going to amount to anything crazy, that entire notion has become irrelevant anyway. Programs are now programming themselves. While Deep Blue beating Kasparov in chess in 1994, and more recently, AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol in Go was impressive, as a game developer I know AI’s thrive in games with highly restricting rules and options.
But OpenAI 5 beating the World Champion DOTA2 Team was something else entirely. DOTA2 being a game with free movement and hundreds of abilities, as a gamer and programmer I know this was a landmark in AI. Especially because in a game like DOTA2, the AI can’t leverage superhuman aim or other unfair advantages over the humans. The implications are huge: will we soon practice against humans to beat the AI? Instead of the other way around? Whatever the case, it shows that what mr. Hinssen writes are no hollow words. AI is about to disrupt everything. The DOTA2 World Champions will agree.
For me, Peter strikes that perfect balance between techno-optimists (Singularity University) and techo-skeptics like Robert J. Gordon. Peter Hinssen argues that we shouldn’t be blind to the dark sides of these new technologies (his chapter ‘A tale of two futures’ is my favorite of the entire book) but we also shouldn’t be naive in thinking these new technologies aren’t going to massively disrupt entire markets. It has already happened in the last 3 decades and this book will outline those patterns in a very clear manner.
Another of my favorite paragraphs in this book:
"That's great, right? Yes, yes it is.
But think about how this will affect how we live. How better healthcare will allow people to live longer and healthier lives ... in a world where there will be less and less work."
Reading this in the middle of a pandemic (that has been raging for a year) has been quite the experience. While the internet is 20 years old it feels like it’s just starting to wake up right now to its full potential. Things are going crazy. Echo chambers on Facebook are radicalizing the average Joe and Jane with conspiracy theories. No legislation in sight to put a hold to it. Meanwhile retail investors, mostly from the subreddit WallStreetBets, are waging a war against the rich Hedge Funds. The latter, with their employees schooled with traditional game theory, were completely caught off guard by this internet spawned frenzy.
All the while we are being bogged down by our hopelessly outdated political systems. Who like Peter Hinssen said, are completely unprepared for the Day after Tomorrow.