Each new communications medium — writing, newspapers, radio, television — has both created essential progress and posed new and potentially harmful challenges to society. The fundamental lesson we need to learn from our history is not that we should halt or reverse innovation, but rather that we need to evolve new technology and its interface…
For decades, John Doerr has been the leading evangelist for using objectives and key results (OKRs) to manage world-changing organizations. John has helped spread OKRs from Intel, where he learned the technique from the legendary Andy Grove, to organizations like Google and the Gates Foundation, to present-day startups like Zume (where robots and algorithms help…
I recently had the pleasure of attending an OpenAI event, where a number of academics, government types, and entrepreneurs convened to discuss artificial intelligence. The questions ranged from the changing nature of work, to how AI can play into international relations, to transformation of industries, to what the state-of-the-art is. Obviously, artificial intelligence is a complex…
Collusion. Corruption. Covfefe. In 2017, it was easy to get distracted — and distraught — by President Trump’s Category 5 tweetstorms and the news cycles they drove. And thanks to the connectedness we now experience through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we often feel every newsworthy event with both apocalyptic urgency and a sense of fatigue that can paralyze us…
I don’t often write immediate reactions to recent news. However, after reading an article published by The Information regarding sexual harassment allegations against venture capitalist Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital, I feel that the subject is so important that I must write immediately. In the article, journalist Reed Albergotti compiles first-hand accounts from six women, including three…
Soon, self-driving cars will turn Highway 101 into an office park, and we’ll all keep working right through rush hour. But where is the technology that will liberate us from a productivity killer that’s nearly as lethal as the morning commute? At thousands of conferences every year, millions of panel sessions consume billions of man-hours…
Recall Judge Aaron Persky Three months ago, former Stanford student Brock Turner was convicted on three counts of sexual felony assault, for crimes he committed against an intoxicated and unconscious woman next to a dumpster outside a frat party. Today, he is being released from Santa Clara County Jail after serving just half of his six-month sentence. While…
The Seventh Sense will help you develop a feel for the Networked Age As Joshua Cooper Ramo suggests in his important new book, The Seventh Sense, massively scaled, always-on connection changes the nature of objects and institutions. A heart-rate monitor that shares information with a million other heart-rate monitors functions differently than one that operates in standalone fashion. The…
This essay originally appeared on MIT Sloan Management Review as part of their Frontiers Essay Series. Each essay is a response to this question: “Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?” Artificial Intelligence is about to transform management from an art…
Introducing the Berggruen Philosophy Prize and my nominee for it, Robert Wright “We need more welders and less philosophers,” Marco Rubio exclaimed during a presidential debate last fall. The larger point he was trying to make was about the virtues of vocational training, and the role it can play in helping young people develop relevant skills that…
A review of William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better No one donates money to try really hard to cure cancer, or deeply empathize with Siberian tigers. The goal is to eradicate cancer. The goal is to save Siberian tigers from extinction. And yet while philanthropy is oriented around specific outcomes, it’s often driven by emotion more than…
Our world is getting more and more virtualized – but ultimately the Networked Age runs on power strips, cargo ships, and Uber trips. And over the next decade and a half, as 2.5 billion people in China, India, and other developing countries come online and join the global middle class, the global demand for energy…
At least one global cryptocurrency will achieve mass-market adoption. That cryptocurrency will either be Bitcoin or a derivative inspired by it. The chance that it will be the former is so strong that in 2014 I invested in Bitcoin startups Xapo and Blockstream. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, when one of the very smart people I…
Bitcoin is often characterized in the media as a volatile virtual commodity that can optimize speculation even more efficiently than gold, securitized subprime mortgages, or tulips. That’s not how I think about it. For me, Bitcoin is a transformative addition to Internet communication protocols that will create new networks of trust, fuel massive economic ecosystems,…
How updating the communication device known as a “diploma” will help students acquire the right skills and help companies hire the right talent. Every year, millions of Americans embark on the quest to earn a four-year college degree. Many motives propel them. They go to acquire skills and knowledge from experts in their fields. They…