I cannot say I recommend this book. People may consider George Gilder to be a great thinker, but he is an awful writer and narrator.

His central thesis is that Google's (and I assume he includes Facebook in this thesis) days of dominance are nearing an end. I am not enough of a "tech guru" to dispute his premise or to accept it. However, I hoped to read a book that was going to take me through the argument in a coherent manner.

His logic is lost in a swirling ocean of anecdotes and jargon.
If his target audience is restricted to people who are experts in this field, then he should not have published the book, intending for a wider audience to read it.

Find a better book. This is my advice. ( )

Time, space, matter, energy, knowledge and information.

One of the largest impediments to any good, proper and complete understanding of our universe, of ourselves and of our own position within it, is the current failure to firstly define and understand ‘information’ itself.

Although I’m not prepared to divulge ‘information’s’ correct ontological identity here, I can quite confidently say that it is not ‘digits’ no matter how many of the latter one may have at one’s disposal, nor how cleverly arranged they are, nor how large, powerful, numerous and globally interconnected are any of the machines and devices operating on them.

‘Digits’ are, patently enough, very useful things with which to count and calculate - to add, subtract, multiple and divide. We first used our own anatomical digits - our fingers and toes - for these particular tasks, then we scratched marks on (prison !) walls, next we invented the abacus and although we chew constantly on the idea that our modern day computers and communications devices are ‘real thinking machines’ they are quite demonstrably not, but are, rather, only ‘bean counters’; they are none other than vastly accelerated, massively miniaturised, hugely interconnected, user-friendliarised, electronically-automated ABACUSES.

In ‘Life After Google’ George Gilder makes note of this particular fact - that is, he makes note of the abacusial status of our now many and various computing/communicating machines and devices, concomitantly reminding us that these machines can only count and calculate and otherwise entirely lack the ability to actually ‘think’.

In spite of his recognition of these particular facts, Gilder has not yet figured out exactly what ‘information’ is - as a phenomenon in its own right and not just what any of it says or means - nor has he ascertained the exact nature of any of the directly information-related phenomena such as ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’, ‘memory’, ‘understanding’, ‘knowledge’, ‘knowing’ and ‘consciousness’.

I can also quite confidently assert that once ‘information’s’ correct identity is recognised and as such factored into our understandings of ourselves and of our universe, it becomes eminently possible to, firstly, identify, define, describe and fully understand all of the directly information-related phenomena such as ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘intelligence’, ‘memory’, ‘understanding’, ‘knowledge’, ‘knowing’, ‘sentience’ and ‘consciousness’ (to far less than exhaust the list), and then by building on these particular understandings, it subsequently becomes equally eminently possible to establish the ontological identities of everything else here inside our universe - time, space, matter, energy, entropy, motion, inertia, knowledge and knowing. ( )

George Gilder is an investor, futurist, gold-bug, and conservative dinosaur.

The first fifth of this book is an impressive indictment of the contemporary computing paradigm. Gilder points out that, in the 1930s, mathematicians moved away from a theory of the world that held that, with an infinite amount of information, the future could be determined with infinite precision. Post 1930s, math has embraced the fundamental element of hazard in our universe as a force for creativity and non-determinism.

Computing over the past half century, on the other hand, has been driven by a deterministic paradigm indicated by its reliance on the Markov chain. Markov chains, given a certain set of circumstances, predict the statistical likelihood of various outcomes in the immediate future. To better understand the concept, watch the documentary "AlphaGo" about Google DeepMind beating the world's premier go player in 2016. Markov chains are great at helping search algorithms, but are also creating a world where the divergence is smushed out by advertising algorithms, as bemoaned by disillusioned tech bros over the past five years.

At this point in the book, Gilder's narrative arc scatters. His journalism shifts to the blockchain revolution. Having been a blockchain insider for the past three years, I find that Gilder offers a nice synopsis of recent history, but I don't find value-add to his rhetoric during this (dominant) section of the book. Although the crypto ethos generally has an emphasis on personal liberty at odds with the gods of advertising, it is unclear whether or not this disruption will bring down the tech behemoths of our day, or merely be subsumed by them.

The following two quotes illustrate the potency of Gilder's perspectives when it comes to how we've been overselling AI:

"The claim of 'superhuman performance' seems rather over-wrought to me. Outperforming unaided human beings is what machines—from a 3D printer to a plow—are supposed to do. Otherwise we wouldn't build them...Speed of iteration is not the same as intelligence." (page 98)

"The problem is not AI itself, which is an impressive technology with much promise for improving human life. What transforms 'super-AI' from a technology to a religious cult is the assumption that the human mind is essentially a computer, a material machine. That assumption springs from a belief in evolution as a random process that has produced sub-optimal human brains, relatively crude computer "wetware," which in time can be excelled in silicon." (page 99) ( )

God what a bad book. It's rambling with no coherent thesis, often borderline incoherent, unless it is something like "Google is going to be killed by Bitcoin and the blockchain BECAUSE PRIVACY". Which makes about as a much sense as saying "TV is going to be killed by Gold BECAUSE INFLATION" - they just don't have much to do with each other.

There are periodically good insights but they never seem to go anywhere, and the book is filled with either assertions that are entirely dubious or factually false. For example:

"If your product is free, it is not a product, and you are not in business, even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it. " - Where to start with this idiocy? Google does indeed have customers that pay them gazillions of dollars - it's just not those of us pushing the search button. They are not extorting advertisers, the advertisers are throwing money at them because it works. This is just stupid.

He then proceeds to attribute the saying "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" to Tim Cook. I'm sorry, Tim Cook has said something like this but he did not invent this phrase. It's just incorrect.

I'm a technologist - I understand the concepts we're dealing with here, so this isn't based on not understanding the basics, the book is just a rambling mess. I'm probably sympathetic to much of his worldview, I'm sympathetic to his outlook that the big guys aren't good for our privacy, and sympathetic to his indictment of the current higher education situation, but this book doesn't really establish that cryptocurrency and the blockchain are the solution.

If you want to understand bitcoin, save your money and just google some bitcoin 101 web posts. ( )

I picked up this book thinking it would talk about the intricacies of bit coin / blockchain. I was wrong. The first half of the book talks mainly about Google and how it works. The second half talks about how blockchain will impact our future.

The writing about blockchain could have been simplified as I had to read those sections a couple of time to understand it. I do admit of having only a basic understanding of blockchain data structure. ( )