Tech Disruption Quotes

The future is closer than you think. You can pay attention now or watch the transformation happen right in front of your eyes

Some people think Elon Musk bought Twitter but what he actually bought is DATA. Whoever has the best information wins. Data is the new oil!

A shift in mindset is required to thrive in the current era and this cannot be achieve at an academic level, social latitude or political sphere but at a personal level.

Embracing innovation and understanding how to navigate the digital era is the key to unlocking new opportunities and staying ahead of the curve.

There is no such thing as job security. Winning or losing is now happening faster than ever before.

Instead of the education system banning ChatGPT from schools, the focus should be geared towards educating students on how to properly use AI tools. Schools should be at the forefront of innovation and technological progress NOT a place for preserving obsolete learning methods and clinging onto archaic practices that are no longer relevant for the world we live in.

Private philanthropy might just be able to make United Nations agencies, international organizations, and government more effective in a way that just increasing taxes on billionaires can't.

Theirs is a worldview in which anything and everything—government, politics, civic society, and law—can and should be disrupted. As Big Tech critic Jonathan Taplin once put it to me, “Demos—society itself—is often viewed as being ‘in the way.’ ”15

But what happens next is worse: context creep. Those who’re most offended by this initial post want to share it with others, and in doing so they inject it with their own editorial bent. Something that was already taken out of its original context is now placed in an entirely new one.

But that process is as much determined by public opinion as by platform owners. The moral container was only set after a public outrage. In this way, the expression of outrage is very much a part of setting boundaries around what we allow platforms to do. Outrage forces moderators to set the defaults.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with twenty other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult. It’s amazing, and hilarious. It’s everything I ever imagined might take place inside a tech company, only even better.

Visionaries are that rare breed of people who have the insight to match up an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to get the rest of their organization to buy into that project. They are the early adopters of high-tech products.

You don’t get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore,” says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. “It’s all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It’s all about getting big fast. Don’t be profitable, just get big.

The history of the Luddites—the real ones, not the pejorative figment of the entrepreneurial imagination—gives us a framework to evaluate the utility of technologies and their social impacts. Erasing that history collapses our thinking about how tech and automation affect our working lives—and the choices we have to address the disruption they bring.

The bottom line is that most technology businesses simply don’t require many employees (think of all the robots roaming around Amazon warehouses), and this will only become truer with time. It’s been estimated that globally, 60 percent of all occupations will, in the next few years, be substantially redefined because of new disruptive technologies. 60

A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.

With Huawei’s design arm proving itself world-class, it wasn’t hard to imagine a future in which Chinese chip design firms were as important customers of TSMC as Silicon Valley giants. If the trends of the late 2010s were projected forward, by 2030 China’s chip industry might rival Silicon Valley for influence. This wouldn’t simply disrupt tech firms and trade flows. It would also reset the balance of military power.

These trigger-chains of moral retribution are beneficial to each of the propagators: They’re financially beneficial to news organizations, which can ensure ad clicks on a trending story. They are beneficial to the platforms that keep us cringing at Bob’s fate, because they keep us glued to our feeds. They’re beneficial for individual users who reshare the post, who increase their follower count and burnish their reputations.

The thing about bozos is that bozos don’t know that they’re bozos. Bozos think they’re the shit, which makes them really annoying but also incredibly entertaining, depending on your point of view. Shrinks call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.

Outlawing subliminals would not necessarily undo generations of conditioning caused by high tech advertisements, anyway,” I added. “It may be that intrusive disruption of conscious thought through such advertisements every eight to twelve minutes has contributed to the rise in Attention Deficit Disorder. Combined with video games, our kids have grown up in a culture of constant subconscious bombardment that disrupts conscious thought. This is a possibility worth looking into. Again, raising awareness is key.

While there are reasons to be sceptical about the predicted technological dystopia that has prompted many high-tech plutocrats to come out in support of basic income, this may nevertheless be a strong factor in mobilizing public pressure and political action. Whether jobs are going to dry up or not, the march of the robots is undoubtedly accentuating insecurity and inequality. A basic income or social dividend system would provide at least a partial antidote to that, as more commentators now recognize.6 For example, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, has described basic income as a ‘plausible’ response to labour market disruption.7

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

This book has pushed back against the randomness thesis, emphasizing instead the skill in venture capital. It has done so for four reasons. First, the existence of path dependency does not actually prove that skill is absent. Venture capitalists need skill to enter the game: as the authors of the NBER paper say, path dependency can only influence which among the many skilled players gets to be the winner. Nor is it clear that path dependency explains why some skilled operators beat other ones. The finding that a partnership’s future IPO rate rises by 1.6 percentage points is not particularly strong, and the history recounted in these pages shows that path dependency is frequently disrupted.[5] Despite his powerful reputation, Arthur Rock was unsuccessful after his Apple investment. Mayfield was a leading force during the 1980s; it too faded. Kleiner Perkins proves that you can dominate the Valley for a quarter of a century and then decline precipitously. Accel succeeded early, hit a rough patch, and then built itself back. In an effort to maintain its sense of paranoia and vigilance, Sequoia once produced a slide listing numerous venture partnerships that flourished and then failed. “The Departed,” it called them. The second reason to believe in skill lies in the origin story of some partnerships. Occasionally a newcomer breaks into the venture elite in such a way that skill obviously does matter. Kleiner Perkins became a leader in the business because of Tandem and Genentech. Both companies were hatched from within the KP office and actively shaped by Tom Perkins; there was nothing lucky about this. Tiger Global and Yuri Milner invented the art of late-stage venture capital. They had a genuinely novel approach to tech investing; they offered much more than the equivalent of another catchy tune competing against others. Paul Graham’s batch-processing method at Y Combinator offered an equally original approach to seed-stage investing. A clever innovation, not random fortune, explains Graham’s place in venture history.

The Disruption Machine What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. by Jill Lepore In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

There are, however, even more serious ramifications. High-tech innovation and marketing expertise are two cornerstones of the U.S. strategy for global competitiveness. We will never have the lowest cost of labor or raw materials, so we must continue to exploit advantages further up the value chain. If we cannot at least learn to predictably and successfully bring high-tech products to market, our countermeasures against the onslaught of commoditizing globalization will falter, placing our entire standard of living in jeopardy.

Before the BUMMER era, any time a new technology came along that made a set of human roles obsolete, new roles appeared that were less physical. Car drivers instead of horsemen. Indeed, the new roles that came into being because of tech disruptions were often more creative and professional than the old ones. Robotics programmers instead of ironworkers. This meant that more and more people gained prestige and economic dignity. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1360-1363). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.

Pollution, corruption, economic problems—there would be enough reason to fear for developing countries even if the coming tech disruption weren’t expected.

Our industry is experiencing, a real “silicon obsession”, and it is important to stay grounded and remember that all that glitters is not gold, especially in tech, where adjective such as "disruptive" are overused and the risk of a bubble is always lurking on the corner.

The tech start-up world from which Musk hails embraces disruption as one of its organizing principles, encouraged in part by the influential blog TechCrunch, which named its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, for the concept. Silicon Valley’s budding capitalists have long been encouraged to use their software prowess and processes to disrupt existing industries, and hence we have Facebook, which disrupted the news media industry, Airbnb, which disrupted hotels, and crowdfunding, which disrupted traditional investing. When Ted Craver asked Musk to share his thoughts on disruption with an audience of old-school electricity providers, you could see why the chairman might nervously fiddle with his pen. Could Tesla, with its emerging energy-storage business, disrupt the utilities? It might have come as some comfort to those at the conference that Musk is no fan of disruption. Indeed, he and Straubel were probably there to convince utilities to work with Tesla on energy storage projects that could benefit both parties. But the industry’s fear that it might have been on the wrong side of history would not have dissipated completely. The same was true for at least one auto industry leader. The man who, until May 2017, was CEO of the Ford Motor Company is one person who does appear to be a fan of disruption. Mark Fields, a Harvard business grad and Clayton Christensen follower, was fifty-three when he was appointed to succeed outgoing CEO Alan Mulally.

Now these types of efforts—focus groups and packaging studies—are traditionally located in the marketing department. But in high tech, marketing is too ignorant to drive the bus. What appears to the generalist to be a simple change may in fact cut across some fundamental technology boundary in a radically inappropriate way. Or conversely, what looks impossible to achieve may in fact be a by-product of a minor adjustment. In either case, engineering must be a direct partner in the effort, or it is wasted. It’s not market research alone, nor is it just product development. It’s whole product R&D, and it implies a new kind of cooperation between organizations traditionally set apart from each other.

In the olden days, big houses in New York impeded creativity—editing, printing, distributing a handful of volumes each year. If a writer somehow failed to catch the fancy of a New York publisher, she was consigned to irrelevance. Amazon disrupted the hell out of that arrangement. Anyone with a novel in a desk drawer could publish directly to Amazon.

There is always a disruption for every generation in a lifetime that renders the previous generation less knowledgeable.

friends.” But Donald Trump’s election in 2016 had disrupted this cozy relationship. “During the US-China trade war, they [Wall Street] tried to help, and I know that my friends on the US side told me that they tried to help [but] Wall Street couldn’t fix Trump.” With comical glee, Di said: “But now we’re seeing Biden was elected,” and the audience erupted in laughter. “Trump has been saying that Biden’s son has some sort of global foundation. Have you noticed that?

The fact that QQ’s own mobile version lost out to an internal underdog has become a classic business case-study on the power of unpredictable disruption. It wasn’t as if Tencent set out to supersede its early hit – it’s just that QQ lost sight of where the future was heading and missed out on the arrival of the mobile era. ‘You either wait for someone else to kill you, or you kill yourself first,’ is one of Pony’s most often-quoted mantras. That value, which has been instilled into every employee, explains Tencent’s paranoid leadership.

Technological advancement is driven by human curiosity and a need to do things faster and easier.

The secret to controlling AI is prompting. Your ability to communicate with large language models will determine how valuable and competitive you in the business world and job market.

Digital disruption is not about new technologies or new Apps. It is about: A new era New ways of thinking New ways of working New ways of leadership New ways of doing business New ways of making a living, etc

In every disruption, there is an opportunity. So, instead of panicking, pay keen attention to the AI disruption and evolve accordingly.

In today's digital world, digital literacy is as important as traditional literacy.

To stop technological progress is to stop human progress altogether.

Another new era in technology has just begun - The AI revolution!

The most valuable asset you can bring to the table is not your degree, but your ability to think and solve problems.

The world will continue to evolve and it's your responsibility to evolve with it. Disrupt Yourself Or Be Disrupted

The involvement and participation of women in tech has never been more important than now. As digital transformation gains momentum with disruptive technologies, the time for women to jump in and participate is now, algorithms will rule the world and we can not look forward to a future of women protesting for gender inclusion when the entire world goes tech and live, algorithms have no emotions.

For Cohen, in debating questions of politics, “One must instead find reasons that are compelling to others, acknowledging those others as equals, aware that they have alternative reasonable commitments, and knowing something about the kinds of commitments they are likely to have.

Mill argued that individuals need to be able to challenge the status quo and test out new ideas if innovation is to take hold.

the region’s success is tied to the people it is able to attract.

the technical ignorance of elected politicians who are hardly credible in providing oversight or contemplating regulation; profound disagreements about what we value and how trade-offs should be made, whether in regard to data privacy, free speech, and content moderation or automation and the future of work; the slow, painstaking consideration of legislation that seems to generate competing bills—so that everyone has his or her name on one—without generating significant progress, especially in a highly polarized political environment; and the strong status quo bias of democratic institutions, which means that policy change is slow and sticky, making it difficult for regulators to respond flexibly and adaptably to new developments in technology.

with the technologists singing the praises of encryption and the national security policy makers puzzled as to why the technologists didn’t seem to care about protecting Americans from terrorists.

If Winston Churchill was right that democracy is nothing more than “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms,” it is worth focusing on the minimal yet fundamental task at which democracies seem to excel: avoiding catastrophic outcomes and striving for stability and resilience to unpredictable shocks. Because even if we can’t agree on exactly the kind of society we want to live in, we can typically come to a consensus on the worst outcomes we want to avoid, such as imposing harm on individuals, being cruel to disadvantaged populations, and creating second-class citizens.

the real value of democracy is the fact that elected leaders must in some sense be responsive and accountable to citizens.

Who would argue for the rule of the worst?

How can we so organize our political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” This shifts our attention away from trying to find the best, most expert leaders to creating rules and institutions that enable us to remove bad leaders and reward good leaders when we have them.

It thus falls to all of us—the citizens—to work the system to get the outcomes we want. In plain terms, Popper said, “It is quite wrong to blame democracy for the political shortcomings of a democratic state. We should rather blame ourselves, that is to say, the citizens of the democratic state.

moving from a process driven by human judgment to one driven by algorithms and data offered Amazon an exciting possibility: to build a recruiting system that would be free of human bias—or at least would improve upon the bias-riddled decision-making of humans.

technologists may simply outrun the rules.

Our challenge is to determine just what that common good entails and how we can harness our democracy to achieve it. This requires focusing on the technologies of the future and the opportunities before us to chart a different way forward.

the very process of deliberation is valuable as it creates the conditions for persuading others of our views and establishing the possibility of a shared commitment to the institutions that collectively govern us.

There are no right answers to the questions we are struggling with. There are only better and worse answers. The answers we choose will reflect not only what the facts and evidence say but also what we value.

The region’s physical infrastructure?

The general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the personal energies enlisted in promoting it.

What is the Sharing Economy? “This boom marks a striking new stage in a deeper transformation. Using the now ubiquitous platform of the smartphone to deliver labour and services in a variety of new ways will challenge many of the fundamental assumptions of 20th-century capitalism, from the nature of the firm to the structure of careers.” – Economist, December 24, 2014 The sharing economy has many synonyms: tech-based capitalism, sharing marketplaces, collaborative consumption, access economy, collaborative economy, 1099 economy, and the list goes on and on. Although we appreciate the complexity of this disruptive technological shift, for the purposes of this book we will simply refer to it as the sharing economy. In its simplest form, the sharing economy is composed of hundreds of online platforms that enable people to turn otherwise unproductive assets into income producing ones. These include their homes, cars, parking spots, clothes, consumer items, pets, hobbies, and many others.

Ultimately the service that skeptics provide to high-tech marketers is to point continually to the discrepancies between the sales claims and the delivered product. These discrepancies, in turn, create opportunities for the customer to fail, and such failures, through word of mouth, will ultimately come back to haunt us as lost market share.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

On balance, disruptive innovation is very positive. In an isolated environment, something is being done in a traditional way. Then innovative entrepreneurs come out and say, “Hey, you can do this much more efficiently for a fraction of the cost and with a tenth of the number of employees.” For customers, it’s fantastic. But there are people who are losing jobs, which is not great for them and potentially a burden for society. Over the long term, however, if you don’t have disruptive innovation, you will become a country or a market full of incumbents and will eventually be disrupted by somebody else, which would be very bad for you. So yes, on balance, disruptive innovation is good. Many people think of technological innovation and entrepreneurship as an American, and particularly a Silicon Valley, specialty. You’re an example of the global spread of tech entrepreneurship. Are you an exception, or are you the new rule? This is something I’m really excited about. One of the reasons I started Atomico eight years ago was to prove that Skype was not just the one exception where a global tech company was created outside of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was the first technology ecosystem created. It’s been around for over 50 years. And it is the most prolific location for creating successful technology businesses. But we did some research and looked at the last ten years in the Internet and software sector to see where the billion-dollar companies were coming from. What we found was that 40 percent of those companies came from Silicon Valley and 60 percent came from outside. My prediction would be that over the next ten years, Silicon Valley will account for less than 40 percent. [For a technology ecosystem to thrive,] you need to have people who are encour aging. You need to have role models. You need to have capital. And you need to have people who want to come and work for these entrepreneurs. That is starting to happen in more and more places. Obviously, China, with Beijing, is in second place. But Sweden is now third in the world in producing billion-dollar software and Internet companies over the last ten years. There’s no lack of talent in these other places, and technology education is very good all around. Ten or 15 years ago, if you wanted to be an Internet innovator or entrepreneur, you packed your bag and bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley and made it over there. Today, you don’t need to do that. You can be equally successful in many other places around the world. This is an irreversible trend. I think you’re going to see more and more great entrepreneurs and great technology companies being created in other places.

One day, Aaron Levie, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of Box, a well-funded new tech company, tells me it’s really important to learn from what happened in the 1990s—which is why he has read a bunch of books about that era.

In a laboratory study, a researcher from Virginia Commonwealth University observed college students during a three-hour study session using video cameras and eye trackers and found that on average, students spent more than an hour listening to music and showed thirty-five interruptions of six seconds or longer, totaling twenty-six disrupted minutes in just three hours.33

You have no real ability to ward [disruption] off or to avoid it,” Iger said. “Except by embracing it in some form and using it for the good, or your own good. And so, I just really believe that when it comes to changes that technology is bringing in our businesses, or in storytelling, for instance, bring it in and use it to your advantage. It’s that simple.

which one—fad or trend—you are dealing with before you start. It would be much better if you could start with a fad, exploit it for all it was worth, and then turn it into a trend. That may seem like a miracle, but that is in essence what high-tech marketing is all about. Every truly innovative high-tech product starts out as a fad—something with no known market value or purpose but with “great properties” that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an “in crowd” of early adopters. That’s the early market. Then comes a period during which the rest of the world watches to see if anything can be made of this; that is the chasm. If in fact something does come out of it—if a value proposition is discovered that can be predictably delivered to a targetable set of customers at a reasonable price—then a new mainstream market segment forms, typically with a rapidity that allows its initial leaders to

AI won't replace thinkers but thinkers who don't think will be replaced.

Of course, great companies want to disrupt themselves before others disrupt them. The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.

The creed of Hindutva that shapes Modi’s worldview says nothing original or new regarding modern government, if it says anything about this at all. It expresses a burning desire to make Bharat Mata great but articulates no pathway of leading her there. Modi wanted to shake up the system but didn’t know what to add to or remove from it. He was not conservative in the sense that he respected and continued with and built on the traditions of government. He was radical, intent on fundamental change. But his radicalism came without a central thesis and with no guiding text. It was introduction of chaos to no particular end. The result, unsurprisingly, was more chaos. His ‘disruptions’, a word beloved of the tech set but loaded with grave consequences for the weak and the poor, were unattached to any core ideology. Disruption to what end? Disruption of whose lives? This was not important.

Others in global development, including groups like Oxfam and leaders like Paul Farmer, take a view that’s more grounded in history and politics. They see in today’s poverty the results of a colonial and imperial history that was designed to exploit countries and people. That exploitation continues in the lives of poorly paid workers in unsafe sweatshops stitching our clothing, in factories that pollute over there so we can have clean air over here, and in poor people using their bare hands to mine the metals that make our high-end smartphones work.

ambitious enough, the kind of thing we can pull off in six months to a year or so, and not substantial enough to inspire anyone. Don't be afraid to disrupt yourselves because, if you don't, someone else will. So many companies focus their efforts on protecting what they have rather than constantly creating new value for their customers. Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. The product vision needs to inspire. Remember that we need product teams of missionaries, not mercenaries. More than anything else, it is the product vision that will inspire missionary‐like passion in the organization. Create something you can get excited about. You can make any product vision meaningful if you focus on how you genuinely help your users and customers.

This is the reason why a favorite buzzword in tech CEO circles is “disruptive.” The primary thing every digital company wants to “disrupt” is a human society from which they are not profiting. The more that tech platforms and policies are able to shut down human community, and restrict the freedom of humans, the wealthier the Big Tech corporations become.

Disruption has been a favorite word of the Tech economy, but old-timers saw homes, communities, traditions, and relationships being disrupted.

The issues surrounding technological advancements cannot be left only to tech experts, governments or business executives to address. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here and is completely transforming the way we live and work. These unprecedented technologies require youths from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to join the conversation and become part of the revolution!

is the solution proposed one that would be good for human beings and for society?

Trying to slow progress or demand is foolhardy; but leaving the economy to a handful of digital monopolies will be problematic for our companies, our staff, and our social systems. If we do not turn this tide—the increasing amount of wealth in the hands of tech giants, and the network effects of technologies making effective government regulation difficult at best—the consequences could be more dire than the mass company extinctions that we witnessed in the four previous ages.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. —Herbert Simon, Designing Organization for an Information Rich World

On the one hand, Vacca was enthusiastic that New York was at the forefront of using data to improve the delivery of city services. But he was also deeply troubled that those on the receiving end of these decisions were not even aware of how they were being made or how they might challenge them if they seemed wrong. Vacca proposed legislation to mandate that city agencies publish the source code of all algorithms and allow members of the public to self-test them by submitting their own data and getting the results. During a committee hearing in 2017, he framed his bill as a key to democracy in the digital age: “In our city it is not always clear when and why agencies deploy algorithms, and when they do, it is often unclear what assumptions they are based upon and what data they even consider. . . . When government institutions utilize obscure algorithms, our principles of democratic accountability are undermined.

The reality was that even elected officials were unable to get information about algorithms that were making critical decisions about New Yorkers’ lives.

Expertise is needed, and organizing and deploying this expertise will be one of the costs associated with harnessing the efficiency gains of these systems.

All privacy for prisoners was sacrificed in the name of improved security.

He described it as a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example: and that, to a degree equally without example, secured by whoever chooses to have it so, against abuse.” The better the surveillance, the better the control over prisoners, and at little risk to the guards. “It is obvious,” he wrote, “that in all these instances the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained.

If one of the most powerful companies in the world can’t successfully build an algorithmic tool free of bias, can anyone?

The decision to use algorithms, especially when dressed up in the language of artificial intelligence, is often treated as a magic potion by its most naive enthusiasts. This is nothing more than wishful thinking.

It only makes sense that this technology, combined with an optimization mindset, would develop new ways in which humanity can improve on the error-prone decision-making processes of biased and inconsistent people.

When thinking about algorithmic decision-making, it is helpful to distinguish between two kinds of fairness: substantive and procedural. Substantive fairness focuses on the outcomes of some decision. Procedural fairness focuses on the process that generates the outcome. If the process is deemed fair, we don’t have to concern ourselves with the outcome. Algorithms that are fair will involve both substantive and procedural considerations.

Empathy always plays a distinct role in propaganda, explicitly asking the viewers to feel the suffering of the enemy’s victims and calling on them to respond with condemnation and moral outrage.

The second was that moral extremes often have terrible outcomes for societies.

Vladimir Putin declared, “Whoever becomes the leader in [artificial intelligence] will become the ruler of the world.

a natural response to a decision-making process that is not understandable is to see it as unfair. And any perception of unfairness, especially in regard to the decisions made by public sector institutions, is a significant threat to legitimacy.

The résumé-screening model was a failure, but the process that led to its analysis, attempted repair, and eventual abandonment was not.

We can’t leave it up to the goodwill of companies and government agencies to do the hard work of auditing and refining their algorithms while shielded from public view. Instead, we need to create an expectation that they will do so, transparently, as part of a new era of algorithmic accountability. Many decisions that impact our lives will depend on it.

Instead of resisting technological progress, embrace it. Embrace the AI revolution and learn how to use it. Learn how to talk and communicate better with AI tools. The key to unlocking human potential lies in collaborating and improving our communication with AI systems.

The state of digital transformation in Africa is one of both opportunities and challenges.

Human potential is not limited by technology, but rather, it is unlocked by it. The value of AI lies in the human touch that drives it forward.

The future belongs to those who can harness the power of AI to unlock their own potential and create new opportunities.