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075 George Gilder: Life After Google

The current internet is dominated by centralized control, which is prone to security breaches and vulnerable to manipulation by big tech companies.

Duration: 09 hours
38 minutes
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George Gilder: Life After Google

Summary

George Gilder argues that the internet is broken and needs to be fixed. He believes that blockchain technology is the solution, offering a decentralized and secure alternative to the current centralized system dominated by tech giants like Google. He explores the potential of blockchain to revolutionize the internet and the economy, enabling greater privacy and security, as well as facilitating a shift towards a more human-centered and value-driven system.

About

Title: Life After Google

Author: George Gilder

Publishing year: 2018

Publisher: Regnery Publishing

Length in hours: 9 hours and 38 minutes

5 main ideas

  1. The current internet is dominated by centralized control, which is prone to security breaches and vulnerable to manipulation by big tech companies.
  2. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized alternative that is more secure, private, and resistant to manipulation.
  3. The blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the economy by enabling new forms of peer-to-peer transactions and disrupting traditional intermediaries.
  4. Blockchain technology will require a new way of thinking about value, as it places greater emphasis on authenticity and provenance.
  5. The blockchain is not a panacea, and its potential benefits will only be realized if it is developed and implemented in a responsible and ethical way.
George Gilder: Life After Google

5 funny quotes

  1. "Google is very patient, it's a patient company, until it isn't."
  2. "The invisible hand of Google's algorithms somehow became the visible fist of the state."
  3. "The Internet is like a city, and Google built the sewage system."
  4. "Google's algorithms may have beaten Kasparov, but they couldn't beat the Go grandmasters. What is it that they know that computers can't?"
  5. "The vision of a decentralized Internet, made up of nodes and individual creators, is starting to come back to life."

5 thought-provoking quotes​

  1. "The new era of Google and social media was supposed to liberate us from the shackles of bureaucratic organization and the statist nation-state. But as it evolved, it became a new era of surveillance and control."
  2. "The Google system made possible a new kind of totalitarianism, as it tracked everything we do and know, and subtly shaped our thoughts and responses accordingly."
  3. "The new society of Internet-based knowledge will not be a post-human era. It will be more human than any era in history."
  4. "The failure of Google is not merely a business failure or the failure of a technology. It is the failure of a new kind of economic and social organization."
  5. "Google is the past, not the future."

5 dilemmas

  1. How can we balance the need for privacy and security with the convenience of big data and machine learning?
  2. What happens when the decentralized, distributed web collides with the centralized business models of the tech giants?
  3. How can we ensure that AI serves humanity, rather than the other way around?
  4. Is it possible to build an internet that values privacy and freedom, without sacrificing convenience and innovation?
  5. How can we ensure that the benefits of new technologies are distributed fairly across society, and not just concentrated among a privileged few?

5 examples

  1. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.
  2. Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.
  3. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation.
  4. Baidu, the Chinese search engine.
  5. Craig Wright, who claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin.

Referenced books

  1. "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" by Tim Wu
  2. "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail" by Clayton M. Christensen
  3. "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" by Ray Kurzweil: 
  4. "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek
  5. "The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order" by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey

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"The Internet is like a city, and Google built the sewage system."

George Gilder: Life After Google

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