Until they get this model right this is like an industry trying to run with shackles on their feet. I long for the day where ebooks have the same rights and freedoms as their print brethren.

“Each year, Technology Review selects what it believes are the 10 most important emerging technologies. The winners are chosen based on the editors’ coverage of key fields. The question that we ask is simple: is the technology likely to change the world?”

This year’s list contains three technologies that caught my eye:

• Real-time search — search engines wrestling to make sense of streams of real-time information from sources like Facebook and Twitter
• Social TV — remember all of the talk about interactive TV? Seems we have arrived there given the use of social media tools as a back channel for conversations amongst friends watching TV (same time / different place). But there is research underway to enhance this.
• Cloud programming — featuring research from those working on better programming tools for cloud computing

Worth the read.

“… created what he called advanced chess, in which players are assisted by off-the-shelf software. Each competitor enters the position of their pieces into a computer and uses the moves that the program recommends to inform their decisionmaking.

At a “freestyle” online tournament in 2005, where any kind of entrant was allowed, such human-machine pairings were absolutely awesome. In fact, the overall winner wasn’t one of the grandmasters or supercomputers; it was a pair of twentysomething amateurs using run-of-the-mill PCs and inexpensive apps. …”

Clive notes that

The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts.

And …

As we face that trade-off, figuring out how to integrate machine intelligence into our personal lives becomes the key challenge. When should you rely on online tools to fill you in on the news or your friends’ lives? When should you forage on your own?

There’s no one answer — and there never will be, because everyone is different. It’s a personal quest. But there’s also no avoiding the question, because it’s clear that serious cognitive advantages accrue to those who are best at thinking alongside machines.

Ultimately, the real question is, what sort of cyborg do you want to be?

This article is worth reading. It leads to the conclusion that the answers to performance (personal or organizational) lie not in ‘either | or’ trade-offs but rather in how we combine the power of machines and humans.

If you know of other books that should be on this list, I would love to hear from you.

/Joel

Ben Franklin agreed. “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

We think our perspectives on knowledge are new. Think again.

If you have any old quotes / perspectives, please share them with us.

The presentation is on SlideShare (this time I edited it in advance to avoid the formatting problems).

Enjoy

I have posted the slides on SlideShare (if you have not explored SlideShare, I would encourage you to do so. A great place to find and share slides on almost any topic. Some of the slides are shared with a Creative Commons license – as I have done with this slide deck. Have fun exploring!)

[By the way, it took several tries to get this right on SlideShare. Seems that in reformatting slides for their website, they change fonts and alignment. Thanks Blaise for proofreading those slides and pointing that out.]