THE FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE MONTH
FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: “Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes gets across less than the maximum philosophical decibel… Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words fall in a romantic waterfall.”
“Google’s algorithms assume that the future of the world is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption runs, what motivates people to make it, and why it is wrong: the future depends on human action. — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
The age of Google, based on big data and artificial intelligence, has been an incredible age. But it is coming to an end. In Life After Google, George Gilder, the peerless visionary of technology and culture, explains why Silicon Valley is having a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google era dawns.
Google’s amazing ability to “search and sort” attracts everyone to its search engine and countless other advantages: videos, maps, email, calendars… And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users are subjected to advertising. The “add and advertise” system works, for a while, if you control a data center empire, but a priceless marketplace strangles entrepreneurship and turns the internet into an ad wasteland.
The crisis is not only economic. Despite advances in artificial intelligence inducing delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has all but given up on security. The Internet firewalls that are supposed to protect all those passwords and personal information have proven to be hopelessly leaky.
The crisis cannot be resolved within the current architecture of computers and networks. The future is in the “cryptocosm”, the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. By enabling cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the internet with a secure global payment system, ending Google’s era of aggregation and advertising.
Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, is facing a “big unbundle,” which will disperse computing power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet.
Life after Google is almost here.
Released: January 2022
