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Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Everyday Chaos

Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility by David Weinberger.

Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility by David Weinberger

David holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is widely published including Wired, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He is Co-Director of Harvard Library’s Innovation Lab; Writer-in-residence at a Google AI lab; Senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; and a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department.

David previously authored The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything is Miscellaneous, and Too Big to Know. Having read these books, David’s writing both inspirational and spot on regarding how internet technologies are shifting the global world. My only regret is not reading this book the day it hit newsstands. And based upon his previous works, will not make that mistake moving forward.

Everyday Chaos is focusing on artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and a very dynamic internet. Rolling into a somewhat staggering force, these technologies are certainly revealing how complex the world is today. Perhaps the most important message, we now find ourselves facing a digital transformation more unpredictable even by those who created the technologies.

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Design Education Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest read: Too Big to Know

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger is an amazing look at how vast amounts of knowledge in our digital world has changed our ability to not only comprehend data, but how data and the internet rewire how our brain’s process information.
Too Big to KnowIn a way this book is about networks of knowledge stored in databases and in people. So what happens to all the knowledge and expertise we now confront? Outside of it being somewhat accessible on the net, the large amounts of data are forcing us to reimagine data infrastructure.

This is pushing development of large “big data” solutions that will have the ability to process and dashboard results that are more easily “digestable” for larger and larger groups of people across the spectrum.

Weinberger confirms that there is so much data, information & knowledge today for the first time in our collective history that no single person can process it all. And that is not always a good thing. He stated “We see all too clearly how impotent facts are in the face of firmly held beliefs. We have access to more facts than ever before, so we can see more convincingly than ever before that facts are not doing the job we hired them for.”

And at the same time accounting for human nature – access to more data will only reinforce the worse as illustrated by Cass Sunstein: “Studies have shown that when people speak only with those with whom they agree, they not only become more convinced of their own views, they tend to adopt more extreme versions of those views.” And now you know the rest of the story.

Too Big to Know reveals in chapter eight how we are managed today. In the past we learned about Jack Welch of GE. He was the final, top decision maker. But today with wikis, blogs and mobile technology GE’s strategic plans are made from the bottom up: “The CEO of General Electric could be entirely off the grid, but still GE’s engineers, product managers, and marketing folks are out on the Net, exploring and trying out the ideas that affect their branch of the larger decision tree.” This is the ‘wikipedia’ approach. This is also something Weinberger acknowledges in Don Tapscott’s work Wikinomics.

Finally, I could not agree more with Weinberger’s example (Chapter five) regarding a marketplace of echoes. He describes the impact of David Halberstam‘s award winning book The Best and the Brightest. (my review here) Halberstam attempted to explain how the Kennedy White House, full of highly educated, dedicated men (McGeorge Bundy, George Ball, Chester Bowles, Robert McNamara) could have failed so badly in Vietnam. Their efforts are now very distant, recalled most often as an analogy to our country’s worst mistake. But Halberstam’s question remains deeply unsettling: How did the best and the brightest get us into the ‘hell’ of Vietnam? If these men, so well educated and worldly, erred so badly, how can we trust the advice of lesser men?

No better lesson on diversity than our failure in Vietnam. This is a very good book.

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Design Education Globalization Network OpenSource Reading Rich media Technology

Latest read: Everything is Miscellaneous

David Weinberger’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is really amazing. It follows on the footsteps of Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail.

Everything is MiscellaneousThis book presents an interesting look at the digital data we have access to via the internet and how the distribution of data will forever change business, education and society.

What is the biggest change outlined by David Weinberger? The world’s data will be tagged and freely shared, all on the internet.

From the Dewey Decimal System to Flickr and everything in between … is now miscellaneous.