While thinking of what books I want to read in 2018 I went back and looked at my favourites for 2017.
Here are a few of the non-fiction books I enjoyed, an old fiction classic I revisited, and a bonus from 2016.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella and Greg Shaw
Satya Nadella takes us through his personal history and Microsoft’s and hammers the importance of culture inside a large organization. He shows that culture really does need to start at the top for it reach everyone. How people with a purpose work more creatively and harder. If your business has a culture problem this is a great book to give ideas and inspiration on how to change it.
Machine Platform Crowd, Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
I’ve enjoyed all of the books in Erik and Andrew’s series of Race Against the Machine, The Second Machine Age, and now Machine Platform Crowd. If you a policy maker or a business leader and aren’t caught up on what’s coming, The Second Machine Age can still bring you up to speed. After that, you should jump right into Machine Platform Crowd and see how to take advantage of the current trends in technology and how it affects economics. MPC is a great 10,000-foot view that can give you ideas on how to maneuver through the quickly changing economic and technological landscape.
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Somehow, even though I’ve had an interest in VR since the 1990s, the name Jaron Lanier never really stuck with me in any meaningful way. I’m sure I had heard his name as trivia of who had coined the term ‘Virtual Reality’, but other than that I had no idea the interesting and varied history of this man and how he added to and continues to develop VR and AR. I was fascinated to learn how much VR had been developed in the 1980s. That there had already been VR surgery simulators in use as teaching tools. Also how much we’ve forgotten when it comes to UX design that had already been explored by VR pioneers in the 80s and 90s. If you love VR and want to know its history, you have to read this book.
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
by Max Tegmark
Life 3.0 takes us through possible future scenarios starting off with a story snipped to envision how one of those scenarios may play out. Well thought out and thought-provoking. If you think you’ve considered all the ways the future can play out as AI grows, you might want to pick this book and see what you might have missed.
by Isaac Asimov
An Asimov classic and part of the Robot Series, this fictional detective tale set a thousand years in the future still holds up for the most part even though it was written in the early 1950s. My biggest impression from this book was the rate of technological change that was expected. Anything we can wrap our brains around doing these days is usually expected to be done within a decade or so, with many expecting it will happen sooner. There was a number of times in this book when they spoke of new, or altering technologies they already had, on 50-year timescales. In fact, I think the only reason the book was set 1000 years in the future is the author couldn’t possibly comprehend that we may live in a setting quite like this book in less than 100 years from its publication date. You’re not imagining it, change is happening faster all the time, but that can’t go on forever, but when and where are the limits is what none of us know right now.
My bonus from 2016 that seems especially important right now:
Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
This is a book I’m going to revisit before I start on my 2018 reading list. The Blockchain has so many potential uses it really could redefine how all records are kept, and provide us with a new level of trust in their accuracy. But it isn’t perfect but almost every institution on earth sees money in them there blockchains and a lot of research is being done on how to fix the problems with the formula set out in the most famous blockchain, Bitcoin. If you want to try and get your head around the potential and the pitfalls of the blockchain, this well-researched book that started out as a report for the Canadian Senate is your best place to start.
