My Book Reviews

I SBN :  978-0691172798 Verdict :  👍👍   👍 This is one of those books that you have to read in full to fully appreciate, with its well-researched examples to support the concept behind the book.  The book highlights how current automation and Artificial intelligent(AI) systems trends can be used with an historical economic lens to project and address the economic, political and social affects that will arise and by using examples from the industrial revolution when technology displaced workers we can predict the effects of technologies like driverless cars. I like the structured approach to present the argument and learnt along the way with references to various paradox ( Moravec, Polanyi etc. .) which I had not come across before and had to look up  Here are some bits I highlighted in the book. however, there were quite a few so I couldn't  list them all ; The pre-industrial era did not suffer a shortage of imagination, it suffered from a shortage o...

ISBN :  978-0-609-90899 Verdict :  👍👍   👍👍 I actually read this book when it was first published, about 19 years ago, hence the ISBN number does not correspond to that on Amazon ( weird ). However, I decided to revisit this book after reading a misleading post from an IBM Employee promoting the historical credentials in a positive way.  So I picked it up again and scan read taking note of the bits I had previously highlighted approx 2 decades ago to write this review. I t’s one of those books that one should read if interested in the link / connection between business and political regimes.   IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions anticipating the Reich's needs. The amazing thing is that IBM did not sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed to execute the functionality of the machine - execute being an key word ! For m...