Tim O'Reilly, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us (2017)
(Posting notes here.)
I feel like everyone that knows how to make something with a computer ought to know who Tim O'Reilly is because of the wealth of computer books his company has published over the years. Honestly that's about the extent of what I know about him, although what I know was augmented recently by listening to a podcast that interviewed him. (Danny Fortson, Tim O'Reilly: "It's our brains that are being hacked", Danny in the Valley, 2018-01-25.) He struck me as a kind of Silicon Valley Kurt Vonnegut: optimistic in the possibility of humans to do the right thing, but a bit skeptical of the probability of it. Since much of the ground covered there was related to this book—and because they had a copy of it at the nearest STL County Library—I went for it.
From the podcast interview (notes):
[38:32] Just imagining the things that you can imagine, you will always miss things that, in retrospect, seem quite obvious. There'll be some breakthrough, and then all of a sudden a set of people will go, "Holy shit, this is what we can do with that." There's so much that's happening around us. The future happens, as I like to say, gradually and then suddenly.