Tesla’s factory is messy, it hiccups, modules are repaired on the line, stockpiles of parts lie around in “semi-organized” fashion. It goes against all the tenets of the lean manufacturing operation pioneered by Toyota, celebrated in The Machine That Changed The World, and universally adopted for its advantages in reliability, cost, and higher job satisfaction. This is not a manufacturing line that can, by the force of Musk’s will and charisma, produce 10X more cars two years from now.

What Elon Musk has accomplished with Tesla goes beyond good and bad company numbers. Electric cars used to be associated with moderation bordering on self-denial. With the Model S, Musk has given us an electric car that looks like the luxury car that it is… and is a blast to drive (I know, my spouse lets me drive hers). As an impolitic Valley wag once said: Before Tesla, e-cars were for vegetarians; Musk made an electrifying chariot for carnivores.

Jean-Louis Gassée

Andreessen says that Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, which chronicles the banker's time as a Hollywood movie mogul, is one of his favorite books, and he calls Kennedy "the one who wasn't like the others." That sums up Kennedy, and it sums up Andreessen too. Both were outsiders (Kennedy an Irish Catholic Bostonian among Jewish immigrant traders from New York, Andreessen a computer nerd among financiers). "He's someone who looks at society and says interesting things," García Martínez says of Andreessen, "which is unlike most VCs, who are total followers and don’t have much interesting to say about the world."

The title of David Thompson's 2006 Hollywood history, The Whole Equation, is a nod to an oft-quoted passage about Hollywood in F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. "It can be understood," it reads, "but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."

This is how Silicon Valley works too. It makes stars, shaping their origin stories into legends like the one about Lana Turner and Schwab’s Drugstore.

Later, as she rose to fame at MGM, the star machine didn't just change her name and her clothes and her voice. It remade her story. She wasn’t Julia Jean Mildred Francis. She was Lana. She wasn't discovered at Currie’s drinking a Coke. She was discovered at Schwab's Drugstore drinking a chocolate malted, because that sounded better. The studios were shameless about spinning things their way, and the press was shameless about spinning things the same way to keep on the good side of the studios.

Old Hollywood, writes Jeanine Basinger in The Star Machine, another book in the Andreessen lobby, was a factory that built illusions. It transformed ordinary men and women into "the gods and goddesses known as a movie stars." Take Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner. Born in an Idaho mining town, she landed a Hollywood agent after the editor of The Hollywood Reporter spotted her drinking a Coke in Currie’s Candy and Cigar Store, across the street from Hollywood High School.

The story of early Hollywood is very much the story of Silicon Valley, full of innovators fleeing the old rules in search of the new.

Who the Devil Made It—an oral history of Hollywood collected by the director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich—begins in the days of the Patents Company. Allan Dwan, who started making movies in the 1910s, tells Bogdanovich that as independent filmmakers moved west, the Patents Company hired strongmen to enforce its patents. Dwan remembers snipers climbing trees overlooking movie sets and taking shots at the cameras they deemed illegal. He would film as far as he could from the railroad stops, so he and his crew were harder to find.

The lobby also offers myriad books on computer programming and the Silicon Valley ethos, like John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said and Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Silicon Valley’s Secrets Are Hiding in Marc Andreessen’s Library

The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage

Hotz started the autonomous car work because he sees it as Step 1 in the revolution. Transportation is an area where AI can have a massive impact. He hopes to take his technology to retail next, building systems that provide flawless self-checkout at stores. His desire to have AI take over so many jobs stems partly from a near-religious belief in the power and ultimate purpose of technology. “Technology isn’t good or bad,” he says. “There are upsides like nuclear power and downsides like nuclear bombs. Technology is what we make of it. There’s a chance that AI might kill us all, but what we know is that if you’re on the other side of technology, you lose. Betting on technology is always the correct bet.”

By the fall of 2012 he was bored with the contests and decided to dive into a new field—AI. He enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University with the hope of attaining a Ph.D. When not attending class, he consumed every major AI research paper and still had time for some fun. At one point, the virtual-reality company Oculus Rift failed to man its booth at a job fair, and Hotz took it over, posing as a recruiter and collecting résumés from his fellow students. None of this was enough to keep him interested. “I did two semesters and got a 4.0 in their hardest classes,” he says. “I met master’s students who were miserable and grinding away so that they might one day earn a bit more at Google. I was shocked at what I saw and what colleges have become. The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college.”

A short time later I slip into the back of a two-story amphitheater where Zuckerberg, dressed in a dark suit and a tie, has come to make the case that the Internet should be considered, like health care or clean water, a basic human right. He sees this as the most critical social endeavor of our time. Zuckerberg believes peer-to-peer communications will be responsible for redistributing global power, making it possible for any individual to access and share information. People could tap into government services, determine crop prices, get health care. A kid in India—Zuckerberg loves this hypothetical about a kid in India—could potentially go online and learn all of math. “It’s the underpinning for helping people get into the modern economy,” he says. “Ten years from now, we should not have to look back and accept there are people who don’t have access to that.”

Inside Facebook’s Ambitious Plan to Connect the Whole World

So the bottom line is that the Internet as we know it was indeed born as a government project. In fact, without ARPA and Bob Taylor, it could not have come into existence. Private enterprise had no interest in something so visionary and complex, with questionable commercial opportunities. Indeed, the private corporation that then owned monopoly control over America’s communications network, AT&T;, fought tooth and nail against the ARPANet. Luckily for us, a far-sighted government agency prevailed.

And while I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” to support his case,

So, who really did invent the Internet?

Wyler’s gamble is to place O3b’s satellites in what’s known as a medium-earth orbit, which is about 5,000 miles into space. At that distance, data can travel up and back in about 150 milliseconds, a performance comparable to fiber-optic cable. There’s a trade-off: The lower the satellite, the less earth it can see. So O3b is putting up an unusually large number of satellites, 12 so far, with more to come. The cost to launch four satellites—each the size of a large restaurant-grade refrigerator—runs about $300 million, and the company has raised more than $1.3 billion to date from the likes of Google, HSBC, and SES, one of the world’s largest satellite operators.

The New Space Race: One Man's Mission to Build a Galactic Internet

Integrating information flow between varying types of devices from a wide range of global manufacturers with proprietary data and technologies Performing analytics and management of the physical objects and low-level events to detect signals and predict impact Orchestrating those signals and objects to fulfill complex events or end-to-end business processes Securing and monitoring the entire system of devices, connectivity, and information exchange

Sensors and actuators, including implantables and wearables, that let us capture more data and impressions from more objects in more places, and that affect the environment around them. Ubiquitous computing and hyperconnectivity, which exponentially increase the flow of data between people and devices and among devices themselves. Nanotechnology and nanomaterials, which let us build ever more complex devices at microscopic scale. Artificial intelligence, in which algorithms become increasingly capable of making decisions based on past performance and desired results. Vision as an interface to participate in and control augmented and virtual reality Blockchain technology, which makes all kinds of digital transactions secure, verifiable, and potentially automatic.

Ambient Intelligence: What's Next for The Internet of Things?

Steve Jobs: the legacy of Apple's mysterious co-founder

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. Robotics gives the company the ability to act on that information on a massive scale. Google already has enormous amounts of information on humans in general (our queries, our locations from Android, our tasks, our likes and dislikes, etc.) and individuals. Put that knowledge together with mobile robots and you’ve got Companion Bots (or Helper Bots).

If you were in charge of Google’s robotics division and you had all those robotics companies at your disposal, what would you do? What kinds of robots would you build and for what markets?

What 17 Prominent Roboticists Think Google Should Do With Its Robots

Scrollytelling transforms a longform story into an interactive experience. Audio and visual content adds a deeper layer of meaning, communicating what can’t be captured with words alone. Scrollytelling rolls out the details of a story in an engaging way to keep people reading. It uses what's great about the web to tell compelling stories.

Consentful technologies are digital applications and spaces that are built with consent at their core, and that support the self-determination of people who use and are affected by these technologies.

“Machine learning was one of the areas in AI that we thought was kind of most important for everyone to see, which is why that area is required for everyone,” Sahami said. “Through a class like CS 109 that provides an introduction to machine learning, everyone in the CS major will be guaranteed to see at least that level of stuff.” 

The rise of AI in Stanford’s CS curricula

The Obsessive Life and Mysterious Death of the Fisherman Who Discovered The Loch Ness Monster

Developers will be able to easily innovate by creating new apps or improving current apps, all while reusing existing data that was created by other apps.

Because applications are decoupled from the data they produce, users will be able to avoid vendor lock-in, seamlessly switching between apps and personal data storage servers, without losing any data or social connections.

Users should have the freedom to choose where their data resides and who is allowed to access it. By decoupling content from the application itself, users are now able to do so.

In 2009, there is a photograph where my father is no longer there. He passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me. Her face became more forlorn with my departures. In 2017, my mother had to move to assisted living. For a few months, I photographed the good-byes from her apartment door. In October of 2017 she passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph, of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.

Plato believed that expertise is the critical attribute of a leader; He criticizes democracy of seldom producing such characters. Rather, it elects popular spinsters who are effective in manipulating popular opinion.To depict this, Plato uses an analogy of ship navigation in Book VI of ‘The Republic’. He contests that in order to select the appropriate captain, a popular vote is ineffective because people can be swayed by characteristics as irrelevant as their appearance. Instead, we should seek out only the most knowledgeable candidate as it is he who holds the required expertise.Plato illustrates the ignorance that democracy yields in producing a captain:… the true navigator must study the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all the other subjects appropriate to his profession if he is to be really fit to control the ship…[the electorate] think that it’s quite impossible to acquire the professional skill needed for such control and that there’s no such thing as the art of navigation.

Why Plato Hated Democracy

The next $1B consumer startup will be a vertical social network — here’s why

we believe that today’s environment is an ideal launching ground for the next group of billion-dollar consumer companies: vertical social networks. Ten years ago, it seemed impossible for a gaming-only network to be worth a billion dollars — now, we have two! (Twitch and Discord).

Everything has changed—the cinema and the importance it holds in our culture. Of course, it’s hardly surprising that artists such as Godard, Bergman, Kubrick, and Fellini, who once reigned over our great art form like gods, would eventually recede into the shadows with the passing of time. But at this point, we can’t take anything for granted. We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema. In the movie business, which is now the mass visual entertainment business, the emphasis is always on the word “business,” and value is always determined by the amount of money to be made from any given property—in that sense, everything from Sunrise to La Strada to 2001 is now pretty much wrung dry and ready for the “Art Film” swim lane on a streaming platform. Those of us who know the cinema and its history have to share our love and our knowledge with as many people as possible. And we have to make it crystal clear to the current legal owners of these films that they amount to much, much more than mere property to be exploited and then locked away. They are among the greatest treasures of our culture, and they must be treated accordingly. I suppose we also have to refine our notions of what cinema is and what it isn’t. Federico Fellini is a good place to start. You can say a lot of things about Fellini’s movies, but here’s one thing that is incontestable: they are cinema. Fellini’s work goes a long way toward defining the art form.

Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema

Create a video game that lets players explore the Red Planet with a helicopter like the one going to Mars with NASA's Perseverance rover! Use Scratch, a visual programming language and think like NASA space-mission planners to design your game!

We don’t have a decipherment yet but Rao believes that until we find longer samples or a multilingual text, these statistical strategies are our best bet. And Wells says progress will hinge on cooperation. “I think all of the pieces to decipher the script are there,” he says, “teamwork — interdisciplinary, multigenerational probably — the more we work on it the more progress we make.” Wells and his colleagues have made some progress and plan to present it at the meeting this March. Their findings and other work presented at the meeting should be available to the public in April published as the Proceedings of the Second International Meeting on Indus Epigraphy. In the meantime, anyone working on the script is welcome to contribute to Wells’ collaborative website, which features all of the known symbols and various analytical tools.

Cipher War

It's a Dorian Grayish fable, transposed to the twenty-first century: Steve Jobs has become Steve Jobs by doing what nobody else has done before -- by treating computers not just as tools but as mirrors, by making technology not just the engine but the emblem of transcendence. One day, however, he will have to do what everybody else has done before, and will wind up demonstrating what it's like to be mortal, even in the age of the beautiful machine. And now that he has drawn undeniably closer to the day that has given all his other days their urgency -- now that the face staring back in the mirror has lost its shiny-haired California glamour and has taken on the frank rapacity of an old Arab trader -- it's worth asking what the pressure of continual existential awareness has done to him.

Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible

ProPublica’s story exposed racism in the algorithms police use to predict repeat offenders. Assigning a prisoner’s credit score, these algorithms are factored into determining how long a person will stay in jail and at times even used by judges when sentencing. Not only did they FOIA a data set and do a statistical analysis, but this work also made it into a White House report on AI. The article has even influenced a subdiscipline of computer science; at the time of this writing, there were 13 papers on arxiv.org about ProPublica’s article. It turns out that auditing a black-box algorithm is nontrivial.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Green wrote three fantastic cover stories about the upheaval in the Republican Party that led to the election of Donald Trump. Josh doesn't see it this way, but I look at them as a trilogy because they’re interconnected. The first, “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,” introduced many of us to Steve Bannon, the merry provocateur behind Breibart News. OK, this piece came out last year, but bear with me. The second, “How to Get Trump Elected Without Wrecking Everything You Built,” chronicled the sorrows of Reince Priebus, the seemingly hapless GOP chairman who was struggling with Trump’s rise. It also featured an unforgettable cameo appearance by the candidate himself at Trump Tower. Then there was “Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go,” in which Josh and Bloomberg’s Sasha Issenberg visited the Trump campaign’s data collection headquarters in San Antonio and talked to the foot soldiers who helped pulled off the Election Day upset. The gang’s all here in the piece. Bannon is now Trump’s campaign manager. Priebus seems to have figured out his man has a good shot at the White House. Then there’s that techie who looks like an Amish guy prospecting for votes on the internet, who got the job because he designed a cheap website for Ivanka. They all talked at length to Josh because he doesn’t have an agenda; he just wants to find out what’s going on, and when he does, he knows how to turn it into an irresistible read, which is the only way to describe this trilogy. I told him he should turn it into a book next. I still think so. Josh, are you reading this?

Anna Wiener’s fluid first-person essay on life in Silicon Valley is an enviable reminder that business is also culture, and a worthy literary subject, to boot. The author's job at a firm whose clients are other tech firms is the perfect keyhole through which to observe the Valley’s trappings and self-delusions, and her observational skill, wit, and precise, present-tense sentences do the rest of the work, immersing the reader in every scene she describes.

I’m sneaking in a threefer. On WNYC’s show, as bracing as the pitch must have been deadly (Thirty issues? Come on), the deeply informed Brian Lehrer rose above the campaign’s din to talk about issues, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner in my book. Like Lehrer, Tom Ashbrook, whose On Point sprinted into the maelstrom daily, treats every caller with respect but abides no bull. Over at the New Yorker Radio Hour is the appallingly versatile David Remnick, whose bright young show this year featured Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump’s co-author on The Art of the Deal, off Jane Mayer’s important and disturbing piece. You know what? Make it a fourfer. Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield were indispensable in 2016.

Gender and Gender Relations in Manga and Anime

26-Year-Old Programmer Built a $1 Billion App In 2 Years — After Following His Girlfriend’s Advice

The show was part of a larger Computer Literacy Project started by the British government and the BBC as a response to fears that the UK was deeply and alarmingly unprepared for the new revolution in personal computing that was happening in America. Unlike most TV shows, the BBC wanted to feature a computer on the show that would be used to explain fundamental computing concepts and teach a bit of BASIC programming. The concepts included graphics and sound, the ability to connect to teletext networks, speech synthesis, and even some rudimentary AI. As a result, the computer needed for the show would have to be pretty good—in fact, the producers' demands were initially so high that nothing on the market really satisfied the BBC's aspirations.

But everything truly did sort of get set in motion by a TV show—a 1982 BBC program called The Computer Programme. This was an attempt by the BBC to educate Britons about just what the hell all these new fancy machines that looked like crappy typewriters connected to your telly were all about.

How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world

Seeking the Truth Behind Books Bound in Human Skin

The Easiest Way to Build a Habit of Reading 100 Books a Year

Artificial intelligence has already changed the world in some pretty dramatic ways and will certainly do even more so in the future. But it’s a component technology. The transistor has changed the world. But saying, “How are transistors going to change the world?” is almost the wrong layer of abstraction—it’s like trying to understand a river by talking about H20. So artificial intelligence will participate meaningfully in causing technologies to become more intelligent and will shift how we try to deliver value to people. Less and less will technologies need to do what we want them to do through straightforward mechanical and structural solutions and more and more they’ll solve the problems through the increment of intelligence.

We do keep track of projects, especially after we’ve killed them. For two reasons: No. 1, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We don’t want someone who gets hired two years after we kill a project to come up with the same idea and then spend three months rediscovering it. Reason No. 2 is we want to keep track of the ideas that we’ve had—and we do have a database—because sometimes there are presumptions [that could be revisited]. Say we’re going to not work on this project because one of the necessary constituent ingredients is a battery with 10 times the energy density of lithium-ion; it doesn’t exist, we don’t consider that a safe bet that it will appear in the next five years, so let’s not start this project. But then if that battery appeared, we would want to be able to go back and say, “Hey, wait a second, now we can reconsider this as a potential moonshot because that was the reason we killed it and that technology has now appeared.”

So our process is first you have to say what the huge problem is you’re trying to solve. You have to be able to describe it in order for it to have any chance of taking root at X. And there has to be some articulatable, hard but potentially solvable, technology problem at the middle of it. Once that’s true, we go down a path where instead of saying, “What’s most fun to do about this or what’s easiest to do first?” we say, “What is the most likely reason this project won’t make it?”

Astro Teller

Technological change demands stronger and more continuous connections between education and employment

Erwin Panofsky + Meaning in Visual Arts

When you think about the Twitter-driven shake-out of blogging this evolution makes sense: Twitter captured the long-tail of blogs, in the process dramatically expanding the market for publishing text, but that by definition meant that the blogs that remained popular had readers that would jump through hoops — or at least click a link — to consume their content. It makes sense that the most sustainable way for those bloggers to pay the bills was by directly charging their readers, who already had demonstrated an above-average interest in their content. My personal bet is that podcasts will follow a similar path. Podcasts, even more than blogs, require a commitment on the part of the listener, but that commitment is rewarded by a connection to the podcast host that feels even more authentic; host-read podcast advertising leverages this authenticity, but for most medium-sized podcasts charging listeners directly will make more sense in the long run.

Tracking Down DOPE, the First Computer Language for Normal Humans

A Journey Into the Animal Mind

Fireside’s job posting claims “social media has failed us” by creating “antagonistic echo chambers with mediums for communication that only further an outrage culture and business models that incentivize spreading disinformation.” Fireside, the posting says, is looking to foster “civil intelligent discourse, shared connected experiences, and genuine relationship building virtually” through its broadcasting platform, which will “promote driving social impact through meaningful conversations at scale.”

“Today we say goodbye to current media platform limitations created by one-way conversations, a lack of interactivity, and non-existent analytics,” Fatemi writes in the email to creators. “We level the playing field by empowering creators based on what they have to say (not how loud they yell) and we give their ideas the reach to turn a single conversation into the seed of the next media empire.”

The 100 best books of the 21st centuryBooks of the century so far Composite: PR

CPS Steps Clarify and identify the problem Research the problem Formulate creative challenges Generate ideas Combine and evaluate the ideas Draw up an action plan Do it! (implement the ideas)

The Basics of Creative Problem Solving – CPS

Interview // Yoshitomo Nara: On Hope and History

Complexity can show up in many parts of a company: its product and service offerings, its organizational structure and processes, or the environment it faces.3 We found that product and service complexity and the business process aspect of organizational complexity have the biggest impacts on achieving top performance.

Revisiting Complexity in the Digital Age

36 Life Lessons I Learned Before the Age of 30

The Love Business

105 Cultural Artifacts That Influenced Black Mirror Creator Charlie Brooker

11 Top Designers Share Honest Career Advice