IP20: What I've been reading this year
Hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas. Thanks all for reading and for your support through 2023. Onwards to 2024.
As we’re in a week where we might well have more time than usual on our hands, I thought it worth sharing some great things I’ve read in 2023. Not all were published this year, but they all had an impact on how I thought about tech, business or regulation throughout the year.
Before discussing business related reads, there are some books I’ve read this year that I would strongly recommend and that defy categorisation. Indeed they exist in categories of their own.
Danny Finkelstein, a must read columnist in The Times every week has written a hugely powerful book called Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad about the persecution his family faced from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It’s a hugely important and moving read.
Elsewhere, Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring about the attempted revolutions in Europe in 1848/ 49, which simultaneously changed everything and changed nothing, is a cracking read. It’s quite a run of form following The Sleepwalkers and Iron Kingdom.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, with its tales of addiction and poverty in the Appalachians in one of the best fiction books I’ve read for some time and is worth every award and plaudit that it has received.
Enjoy the rest of this Christmas week and looking forward to continuing our dialogue in 2024.
Reading about Disruptors
One of the Inflection Points that I enjoyed writing the most this year was IP14 on Thinking Like A Disruptor - based on the lessons learnt from historical disruptors like Jim Clark at the dawn of the internet and George Stephenson at the dawn of the railways.
Michael Lewis’s book about Clark - The New, New Thing tells a fantastic tale of a Silicon Valley original.
Clark founded three multi billion dollar companies and two of these laid the foundation for the modern internet. Silicon Graphics transformed graphic design and Netscape, through its browser, made the consumer internet possible. In this book Lewis, who spends time with Clark throughout, helps to understand the mindset of a man who was perpetually searching for the new, new thinking.
In the same vein, Loonshots by Safi Bahcall, looks at those innovators who have developed crazy ideas that have often gone on to “win wars, cure diseases and transform industries.” It looks at the importance of nurturing these ideas at an early stage, as displayed best by Vannevar Bush; how these “loonshots” require patience and an acceptance of failure; and how some of the best ideas are ahead of their time and ultimately fail in business terms (Polaroid being used as a great example). Bahcall is right that these ideas at first deemed “crazy” and the innovators behind them are ultimately responsible for economic and social progress.
How these seemingly outlandish ideas are funded and how some of them become multi trillion dollar companies that transform everything is covered brilliantly in Sebastian Mallaby’s excellent The Power Law.
Mallaby analyses how successful venture capital works and the importance of the Power Law (where one investment yields bigger returns than all other investments combined) and why this success has been crucial at turning “crazy ideas” into companies that change the world. This book, packed full of absorbing anecdotes, nicely sets out why the Power Law has been central to the success of Silicon Valley. Other countries who aim to replicate its success should study this book carefully.
On the subject of disruptors, Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk is quite the page-turner. But I keep going back to his excellent The Innovators, which chronicles the geniuses behind the digital revolution.
Reading About AI
As anyone who reads this newsletter regularly will know, I think that Artificial Intelligence is a hugely exciting development for both the economy and society. The advance of AI is already making our lives better and it’s been making products better for many years now. It has also already provided some remarkable internal business drama that I assume next year’s book of the year is already being written about.
A wider media brought up on a diet of dystopian science fiction about the “robots taking control” meant that the agenda quickly moved from the immense opportunity of the emerging technology to lurid speculation about infinitesimally unlikely very long-term “risks”.
Against this backdrop, probably the most powerful case for the broader benefits for AI was made by Marc Andreessen in his superb essay why AI will save the world. As he puts it:
Human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today… Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years… What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.
The whole essay is very much worth a few minutes of your time.
Another ringside view of AI’s development is offered by Mustafa Suleymani’s The Coming Wave. I was working for Google in London when Alpha Go, which was developed by Deepmind (Suleymani was Deepmind’s co-founder) mastered the game of Go - something that many thought would be impossible. The excitement at the time was palpable and that very much showed what AI could make possible. Suleymani is compelling when describing the benefits that the Coming Wave might bring, both in terms of AI and synthetic biology. He also sets out some of the risks and sets out proposals for containing these risks whilst not stunting progress.
I’m not convinced that these containment proposals will be definitive. Nevertheless, at this stage in AI’s progress, the development of agile, pro innovation regulation will require regulators to better understand how the technology is advancing and to also share more actively with innovators how their regulatory mindset is moving. This kind of book represents a helpful addition to that goal. Similarly, 2020’s The Alignment Problem poses many of the ethical questions that many in the field continue to grapple with. The excellent Prediction Machines sets out the economic potential of AI, framed around the ability to build predictions more cheaply.
One book that I’m sure will be topping the book of the year list is my friend and former colleague Verity Harding’s AI Needs You, which is due out next May.
For those of us who’ve been into AI since before it was cool (!) the annual Stanford AI Index has always been essential reading. And this year’s certainly didn’t disappoint. The Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University continues to produce thought-provoking research. Indeed, this paper on Decoding Intentions was seemingly a partial cause for that row at Open AI. Everypixel’s Year In AI sets out how quickly things have moved on this year.
The MIT Technology Review’s daily email is essential and The Information showed themselves to be ahead of the game and particularly well informed at several key moments over the past year.
Another challenge for business in the Age of AI is obliquely contained in J. Bradford Delong’s substantial Slouching Towards Utopia. Delong talks about how innovation and capitalism has made societies materially richer, but also more dissatisfied. Part of this, of course, is explained with the stagnation in real wages in parts of the West in recent decades and through the growth of an hour glass economy, as well as the lingering impact of the Great Financial Crisis. Ensuring that the next wave of AI driven innovation is one that increases shared prosperity is both a skills and public policy issue ( a bit more about this in IP18). It’s also incumbent on tech optimists to make the case more forcibly.
Reading about crises and paradigm shifts in politics
People in the communitarian wing of politics are fond of quoting Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks - notably his line that:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
It feels like modern politics on both sides of the pond is going through an interregnum period, with decades long consensus views being questioned, without being replaced with an adequate governing philosophy. This is taken up by Phil Tinline’s brilliant The Death of Consensus (and I’m not just saying this because he quotes me in it!)
In the book, Tinline talks about three phases in which consensus breaks down and what causes it. The first phase was the growth of a more collectivist consensus the Great Depression and fighting against Fascism. The second was the growth of neo-liberalism in reaction to stagflation and trade union power. And the third, which we’re living through at the moment, is societal reaction to the 2008 Financial Crash and geopolitical shocks, which have produced political turbulence but no coherent governing philosophy.
And, as Inflection Points has long argued, how societies choose to adapt to the dramatic technological changes will play a key part in any new governing philosophies. And how they choose to adapt to these new technologies will dictate whether societies use innovation to grow and prosper.
Looking back to the last regulatory mood shift always portrays a fascinating light on to the present one. As such, Dominic Sandrook’s State of Emergency and Seasons In The Sun present a magnificent history of Britain in the 1970s, with more lessons for today than might be imagined. Perlstein’s great sweep of books about the US in the ‘60s and ‘70s play a similar role Stateside - Before The Storm, The Invisible Bridge, Nixonland and Reaganland are all excellent.
Reading about how we consume news and politics
I thoroughly enjoyed Rob Burley’s book about the history of political interviews in the UK, with the eye catching title of Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?
Burley draws on his experience of producing many of the top political interview programmes in the UK to pepper the book full of entertaining anecdotes lament the decline of the long-form interrogative interview. He regards this as the ultimate test of a politician, with Brian Walden, the former master of interrogation being quoted approvingly when he argued that:
When it comes to uncovering the truth, there is no substitute for sustained questioning in public by a single individual armed with a clear purpose.
It’s hard not to think about how both technology and a growth of TV channels have impacted how we consume politics and how politicians are interrogated. Clips that are shareable on social media might be great for campaigning purposes, but hardly for proving the mettle of politicians. An age of polarisation has created an age of polarised TV networks, catering to various ideological viewpoints, meaning that the setpiece political interview has slipped further from the centre.
This is, of course, fine for politicians. Liz Truss, for example, refused to participate in a long-form interview, preferring to submit to softball questions from Tory supporters. Burley’s book is an entertaining read, but I found its key message to be compelling - that the long-form, setpiece, interrogative interview is crucial for testing politicians and for the health of democracy. It’s also a reminder that we need to start considering how the next wave of technological advance can be used to depolarise, as well as strengthen democracy and bolster democratic processes.