Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility Hardcover – May 14, 2019, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility Hardcover – May 14, 2019, by David Weinberger. Available from Amazon here.

Make. More. Future.

Artificial intelligence, big data, modern science, and the internet are all revealing a fundamental truth: The world is vastly more complex and unpredictable than we’ve allowed ourselves to see.

Now that technology is enabling us to take advantage of all the chaos it’s revealing, our understanding of how things happen is changing–and with it our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our world. This affects everything, from how we approach our everyday lives to how we make moral decisions and how we run our businesses.

Take machine learning, which makes better predictions about weather, medical diagnoses, and product performance than we do–but often does so at the expense of our understanding of how it arrived at those predictions. While this can be dangerous, accepting it is also liberating, for it enables us to harness the complexity of an immense amount of data around us. We are also turning to strategies that avoid anticipating the future altogether, such as A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, open platforms, and user-modifiable video games. We even take for granted that a simple hashtag can organize unplanned, leaderless movements such as #MeToo.

Through stories from history, business, and technEverydayology, philosopher and technologist David Weinberger finds the unifying truths lying below the surface of the tools we take for granted–and a future in which our best strategy often requires holding back from anticipating and instead creating as many possibilities as we can. The book’s imperative for business and beyond is simple: Make. More. Future.

The result is a world no longer focused on limitations but optimized for possibilities.

Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility reviewed

This is one of the best books we have been sent to review recently. It deals with a really interesting topic, and does so in a readable and well explained way. Very early on Weinberger makes the point that if a very simple computer program (The Game of Life), with only four rules, can quickly result in complex and unexpected outcomes, we must remember that life and our wider world is unlikely to be predictable either.

Weinberger also reminds us of the fascinating paradox of the world that we now live in, where we are better able to learn more from all data points that we can capture information from. This leads us to having more data, but also coming to the understanding that things are more complex and less predictable than we may have imagined or hoped for. At the same time, just because systems work in complex ways, this does not preclude us from gaining insights and understandings.

With this concept explained Weinberger then takes us on an interesting tour of various aspects of our lives where we are learning more about complex, chaotic systems, and how it is opening up interesting opportunities in terms of strategy, prediction and beyond. This is a smart, enjoyable book to read and we’d recommend it.

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