The Datapreneurs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bob Muglia: “Advances in information technology tend to come at a rapid pace. The computer revolution is barely 80 years old, yet we now have computers in our smartphones that are many times more powerful than machines that once filled rooms. Now, in early 2023, the changes are coming so fast that it is literally dizzying. It seems like nearly every day there is an article about some new Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability—be it ChatGPT, Dall-e 2, or Stable Diffusion. It appears that humanity is on the cusp of creating super-intelligent machines that are smarter than all of us combined. 

This did not really happen overnight. Bob Muglia, a long-time Microsoft executive, former CEO of Snowflake, and currently a tech investor, explains what brought us to this moment in his new book, The Datapreneurs: The Inventors and Innovations that Enable the AI Future. Muglia takes the reader on a journey from the early days of computing and describes how a succession of data management and analytics technologies have helped build today’s economy and society. Muglia tells his story in part by describing some of the inventors he has known, including famous ones like Bill Gates and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and others that are not household names—yet, anyway—but could help change the world. 

Muglia calls this journey through time and technology “The Arc of Data Innovation.” Each advance on the arc, which he lays out in graphic form in the book, represents one of the key data innovations that have led us to today, where we seem to be on the verge of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), producing machines that will be as intelligent as people. He expects this monumental shift to come within the next ten years. Further on, futurists are predicting mass deployment of machines possessing AGI throughout society, when we will be able to harness universal computer intelligence, accelerate innovation, and rapidly address many of today’s seemingly intractable challenges. Muglia believes that the combination of human and machine intelligence could create an era of progress and prosperity where all the people on Earth can have what they need and want without destroying our natural environment…(More)”.

Behavioural Incentive Design for Health Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Joan Costa-Font, Tony Hockley, Caroline Rudisill: “Behavioural economics has become a popular way of tackling a broad range of issues in public policy. By presenting a more descriptive and possibly accurate representation of human behaviour than traditional economics, Behavioural Incentive Design for Health Policy tries to make sense of decisions that follow a wider conception of welfare, influenced by social norms and narratives, pro-social motivations and choice architectures which were generally neglected by standard economics. The authors show how this model can be applied to tackle a wide range of issues in public health, including smoking, the obesity crisis, exercise uptake, alcoholism, preventive screenings and attitudes towards vaccinations. It shows not only how behavioural economics allows us to better understand such challenges, but also how it can design effective incentives for addressing them. This book is an extensive reassessment of the interaction between behavioural incentives and health….(More)”.

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jennifer Pahlka: “Just when we most need our government to work—to decarbonize our infrastructure and economy, to help the vulnerable through a pandemic, to defend ourselves against global threats—it is faltering. Government at all levels has limped into the digital age, offering online services that can feel even more cumbersome than the paperwork that preceded them and widening the gap between the policy outcomes we intend and what we get.

But it’s not more money or more tech we need. Government is hamstrung by a rigid, industrial-era culture, in which elites dictate policy from on high, disconnected from and too often disdainful of the details of implementation. Lofty goals morph unrecognizably as they cascade through a complex hierarchy. But there is an approach taking hold that keeps pace with today’s world and reclaims government for the people it is supposed to serve. Jennifer Pahlka shows why we must stop trying to move the government we have today onto new technology and instead consider what it would mean to truly recode American government…(More)”.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Book by Jeff Jarvis: “The age of print is a grand exception in history. For five centuries it fostered what some call print culture – a worldview shaped by the completeness, permanence, and authority of the printed word. As a technology, print at its birth was as disruptive as the digital migration of today. Now, as the internet ushers us past print culture, journalist Jeff Jarvis offers important lessons from the era we leave behind.

To understand our transition out of the Gutenberg Age, Jarvis first examines the transition into it. Tracking Western industrialized print to its origins, he explores its invention, spread, and evolution, as well as the bureaucracy and censorship that followed. He also reveals how print gave rise to the idea of the mass – mass media, mass market, mass culture, mass politics, and so on – that came to dominate the public sphere.

What can we glean from the captivating, profound, and challenging history of our devotion to print? Could it be that we are returning to a time before mass media, to a society built on conversation, and that we are relearning how to hold that conversation with ourselves? Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over communication, authorship, and ownership, Jarvis’ exploration of print on a grand scale is also a complex, compelling history of technology and power…(More)”

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Stephen Boucher, Carina Antonia Hallin, and Lex Paulson: “…explores the concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field.

Illustrated by a collection of inspiring case studies and edited by three pioneers in collective intelligence, this handbook serves as a unique primer on the science of collective intelligence applied to public challenges and will inspire public actors, academics, students, and activists across the world to apply collective intelligence in policymaking and administration to explore its potential, both to foster policy innovations and reinvent democracy…(More)”.

Digital Technologies in Emerging Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Francis Fukuyama and Marietje Schaake: “…While there has been a tremendous upsurge in scholarly research into the political and social impacts of digital technologies, the vast majority of this work has tended to focus on rich countries in North America and Europe. Both regions had high levels of internet penetration and the state capacity to take on—potentially, at any rate—regulatory issues raised by digitization….The current volume is an initial effort to rectify the imbalance in the way that centers and programs such as ours look at the world, by focusing on what might broadly be labeled the “global south,” which we have labeled “emerging countries” (ECs). Countries and regions outside of North America and Europe face similar opportunities and challenges to those developed regions, but also problems that are unique to themselves…(More)”.

The History of Rules

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Lorraine Daston: “The rules book began with an everyday observation of the dazzling variety and ubiquity of rules. Every culture has rules, but they’re all different.

I eventually settled on three major meanings of rules: rules as laws, rules as algorithms, and finally, rules as models. The latter meaning was predominant in the Western tradition until the end of the 18th century, and I set out to trace what happened to rules as models, but also the rise of algorithmic rules. It’s hard to imagine now, but the word algorithm didn’t even have an entry in the most comprehensive mathematical encyclopedias of the late 19th century.

To get at these changes over time, I cast my nets very wide. I looked at cookbooks, I looked at the rules of warfare. I looked at rules of games. I looked at rules of monastic orders and traffic regulations, sumptuary regulations, spelling rules, and of course algorithms for how to calculate. And if there’s one take-home message from the book, it is a distinction between thick and thin rules.

Thick rules are rules that come upholstered with all manner of qualifications, examples, caveats, and exceptions. They are rules that are braced to confront a world in which recalcitrant particulars refuse to conform to universals—as opposed to thin rules, of which algorithms are perhaps the best prototype: thin rules are formulated without attention to circumstances. Thin rules brook no quarter, they offer no sense of a variable world. Many bureaucratic rules, especially bureaucratic rules in their Kafkaesque exaggeration, also fit this description.

The arc of the book is not to describe how thick rules became thin rules (because we still have thick and thin rules around us all the time), but rather to determine the point at which thick rules become necessary—when you must anticipate high variability and therefore must tweak your rule to fit circumstances—as opposed to the stable, predictable settings in which we turn to thin rules.

In some historically exceptional cases, thin rules can actually get a job done because the context can be standardized and stabilized…(More)”.

Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal: “AI is now a global phenomenon. Yet Hollywood narratives dominate perceptions of AI in the English-speaking West and beyond, and much of the technology itself is shaped by a disproportionately white, male, US-based elite. However, different cultures have been imagining intelligent machines since long before we could build them, in visions that vary greatly across religious, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions. This book aims to spotlight these alternative visions.

Imagining AI draws attention to the range and variety of visions of a future with intelligent machines and their potential significance for the research, regulation, and implementation of AI. The book is structured geographically, with each chapter presenting insights into how a specific region or culture imagines intelligent machines. The contributors, leading experts from academia and the arts, explore how the encounters between local narratives, digital technologies, and mainstream Western narratives create new imaginaries and insights in different contexts across the globe. The narratives they analyse range from ancient philosophy to contemporary science fiction, and visual art to policy discourse.

The book sheds new light on some of the most important themes in AI ethics, from the differences between Chinese and American visions of AI, to digital neo-colonialism. It is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand how different cultural contexts interplay with the most significant technology of our time…(More)”.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tamara Kneese: “Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
 
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?..(More)”.

Principles of Knowledge Auditing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Patrick Lambe: “A knowledge audit provides an “at a glance” view of an organization’s needs and opportunities. Its purpose is to improve an organization’s effectiveness through a better understanding of the dynamics and levers of knowledge production, access, and use. However, this developing field is hampered by the lack of a common language about the origins and nature of knowledge auditing. In Principles of Knowledge Auditing, Patrick Lambe integrates the theory and practices of the field, laying out principles and guidelines for a clearer and more pragmatic approach to knowledge auditing that makes it more accessible to practitioners and researchers.

Lambe examines knowledge auditing in the context of the development of communications, information, and knowledge management in the twentieth century. He critiques and clarifies ambiguities in how knowledge audits are approached and described, as well as how the results are conveyed within organizations. He discusses the benefits and risks of knowledge management standards. Knowledge auditors, he says, need a common frame of reference more than they need standards. Standards have their uses, but they provide only markers and signposts and are poor representations of the richness of the landscape. He concludes with a set of guiding principles for practitioners…(More)”.