52 things I learned this year … plus some book recommendations

[ Für die deutsche Version klicken Sie hier ]

By:

Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.

with many thanks to my team and now my fellow shareholders who have made this year so successful and fulfilling:

Eric De Grasse, Chief Technology Officer
Alex Hania, Director of the AI-Mobile-Technology Unit
Angela Gambetta, Content Manager
Catarina Conti, Media Analytics
Gregory Lanzenberg, Media Operations Coordinator
Mario Conti, Manager of The Posse List
Alexandra Dumont, Manager of E-Discovery Operations

With very special thanks to Marco Vallini and his video crew, plus my graphics designer Silvio Di Prospero

20  December 2016 (Paris, France) – As a techie, l like everything that makes life quicker, easier and smarter. As my regular readers know I try to be a “Big Picture” guy, being an opsimath at heart and believing everything in technology is related. I pursue a very eclectic conference schedule (click here for details) that provides me perspective and a holistic tech education. Call it my personal “Theory of Everything”.

We will:

• Learn how technology has laid waste to some well-honed business strategies, almost every industry innovating as legacy players and new upstarts battle for relevance

• Discover why Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Uber and others are setting up their second largest development centers outside the U.S., in Europe

• Learn more about the new powerful new business model — the platform – and its built-in advantages that lets a new entrant in an industry trounce a competitor that merely makes and sells products through the traditional pipeline business model

• Learn why blockchain really (I mean really) is being treated seriously in the legal industry

• Find out why the smart set in the e-discovery world are “flipping the binoculars around” – a phrase borrowed from the marketing world to mean turning your attention to things farther afield, looking at how a company in a completely different industry competes, operates, etc.  Quoting one of my stars in the e-discovery firmament at ILTA this past year: “Just because you’re the biggest kid on the block doesn’t mean the other kids stop growing”.

• Learn what Amazon Echo, Google Home and all of this “frictionless” technology is really about.

• Learn why there’s no algorithm for “cool”, no algorithm for “beautiful”. Well, not yet. It’s why the pulses that matter — the disruptive, attention-grabbing content and ideas – still come from creative thinkers, “the magicians”, in all fields.

Yes, the breathtaking advance of scientific discovery and technology has the unknown on the run. Not so long ago, the Creation was 8,000 years old and Heaven hovered a few thousand miles above our heads. Now Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the observable Universe spans 92 billion light years. But I think as we are hurled headlong into the frenetic pace of all this AI development we suffer from illusions of understanding, a false sense of comprehension, failing to  see the looming chasm between what our brain knows and what our mind is capable of accessing. It’s a problem, of course. Science has spawned a proliferation of technology that has dramatically infiltrated all aspects of modern life.  In many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies.

And what I detest is how the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology.

Oops.  A rant was forming.  Anyway, much more to come in 2017.  Right now … onto my “52 things I learned” list …

The main reading room at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris,
a favorite hang-out

My wife and I pride ourselves on our library, numbering 8,000+ volumes at last count. I belong to a publisher’s consortium (a membership that came from a long-time, part-time position as a “professional reader” of unsolicited manuscripts submitted to publishers, one of whom became an IP client; I still read some of the unsolicited manuscripts submitted to them) and I receive about 10 books a month.  Some books stay in my libraries (I keep duplicate copies of my favorite and most-referenced books at my home in Greece) but the bulk go to my foundation for distribution to libraries and schools across Europe that have few financial resources and are in desperate need of books.

And this was an interesting year because the Library of Congress, which recently acquired a substantial part of the papers of Carl Sagan, has been releasing bits and pieces and one item was Sagan’s 1954 reading list (one of his diary entries) and it revealed a blend of wide-angle, cross-disciplinary curiosity and focused, in-field expertise — a balanced approach of reading and “non-reading”. He noted some books were to be read “in whole” and others “in part”. Maria Popova, who is the creator/editor of Brainpickings noted it was a great way to “reverse-engineer one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet”. Sagan noted that success depends on sufficient knowledge of the special subject, and a variety of extraneous knowledge to produce new and original combinations of ideas. Bang. Spot on.

I have long believed that E.B. White’s abiding wisdom on children’s books — “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.” — is equally true of science and technology books. The question of what makes a great book of any kind is, of course, a slippery one, but I think so long as the author “writes up” to the reader in a taxonomy of explanation, elucidation, and enchantment – well, you’re there.

My average reading? Two to four books a month (10 over the summer), the books stuffed in my Karkoa travel bag which has a perfect compartment for paperbacks. I do have quite a few books downloaded on my iPad but I am a tactile kind of a guy and I need to feel the paper.  And as I reported from the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, “digital fatigue” is taking a toll on e-book sales and paper books sales are on the uptick.  Books in print are still seen as a respite from all the screens in our lives.

So many books to recommend but let’s limit this to four :

• Time Travel: A History by science historian and writer extraordinaire James Gleick

I enjoy Gleick. A rare enchanter of science. This is not a “science book” per se, although it draws heavily on the history of twentieth-century science and quantum physics in particular (as well as on millennia of philosophy). It is more a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst.

• When Breath Becomes Air by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi

As one reviewer of this book noted, all life is lived in the shadow of its own finitude, of which we are always aware — an awareness we systematically blunt through the daily distraction of living. This book is Kalanithi’s piercing memoir of being diagnosed with terminal cancer at the peak of a career bursting with potential and a life exploding with aliveness. Maria Popova noted “it is partway between Montaigne and Oliver Sacks”. She gets it right. Kalanithi weaves together philosophical reflections on his personal journey with stories of his patients to illuminate the only thing we have in common — our mortality — and how it spurs all of us, in ways both minute and monumental, to pursue a life of meaning.

• The Gene: An Intimate History by the physician and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee

One of my favorite science authors — best known for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer which was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, a book that has became a mainstay in my artificial intelligence/cancer research — offers a rigorously researched, beautifully written detective story about the genetic components of what we experience as the self, rooted in Mukherjee’s own painful family history of mental illness and radiating a larger inquiry into how genetics illuminates the future of our species. Among the book’s most fascinating threads is Mukherjee’s nuanced, necessary discussion of intelligence and the dark side of IQ.

• The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

I have read too many poor books on globalization but in this book Baldwin has succeeded in saying something both new and true about globalization. In the first globalization, falling transport costs allowed an explosion in trade in goods across the world. In the second globalization, that of today, falling costs of communication generated rapid dissemination of know-how to new centers of production, notably China. A third globalization could follow, he argues, with the virtual movement of people via “telepresence” and “telerobotics”. He explains how we tend to think of competitiveness of individual states (particularly in an era of populist nationalism) – the US is competing against China and Germany. But goods are no longer assembled entirely within the bounds of one factory in one country. Instead, as he explains, many goods are assembled in “global value chains” in which products are designed in one country, but made from parts built in several countries and assembled in another country. As Baldwin writes “the contours of industrial competitiveness are now increasingly defined by the outlines of international production networks rather than the boundaries of nations”.

• The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll

A wonderful red. Carroll (a cosmologist) has written an extraordinarily ambitious synthesis of science and philosophy that aims to make sense of the universe and everything in it, from protons to people, from the Big Bang to the origins of life. Carroll believes in “poetic naturalism”, finding joy in the natural world and rejecting any possibility of the supernatural. The only book on my list I have not finished.  Each page bursts with color.

This was the sign greeting us at Slush2016 …

Helsinki’s average temperature was a frosty 1 degree Celsius in November 2016. Somebody there decided to congratulate any tourists who had been brave enough to make the journey to the snowy city. The Finnish capital has a reputation for cold weather, so why not sell it as an endurance test?

Briefly: despite the sub-zero temperatures, more than 17,500 people came to Helsinki for the annual Slush event which matches startups with investors. Bigger than almost any other event, the 2,300+ startups came from around the world to match-make with 1,100+ investors, plus attendees that just want to see the next “new new thing”.

Held at the Messukeskus Convention Centre (“cyberpunk gothic-tech” as noted by many) it was wall-to-wall with applications that ranged from AI applied text analytics/text extraction to augmented reality to chat bots to food to robotics. I think after Brexit and Trump it was an affirmation that technology and innovation is thriving in a country that gave birth to Linux (still the most influential operating system in the world) and Nokia. Oh, and Angry Birds. Oh, and Clash of the Clans, too.

As I have written before, European technology (and more generally, technology outside of the U.S.) has now broken the mould of trying to be the next “Silicon Valley” and created its own identity and momentum. U.S. companies … Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc., etc. … were here in force because as one attendee told me:

“there are something like 4.8 million professional developers in Europe compared to 4.1 million in the U.S. Given Trump’s threats to curtail work visas, we need to be here looking for talent for our research and development centers.”

As I have noted before, in the last two years U.S. companies have opened more new R&D centers in Europe than in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world.

And there was an  IP workshop. Up until now we’ve been focused on protecting the physical in IoT – devices, structures, the configuration of physical systems, physical outputs, the operation of physical systems and physical connections – but the smart players have been focusing on the needs to be invested in IP protection for methodologies, the configuration of virtual components, data handling and storage, processing algorithms, user interfaces/experiences, methods of use and brand recognition, etc. Huge job. IP lawyers to the rescue!