Synopses & Reviews
Where I saw a thrilling and historic transformation in the worlds oldest ideathe futureother people saw only Target, Facebook, Google, and the government using their data to surveil, track, and trick them . . . But in fact, your data is your best defense against coercive marketing and intrusive government practices. Your data is nothing less than a superpower waiting to be harnessed.” FROM THE INTRODUCTION
In the past, the future was opaquethe territory of fortune-tellers, gurus, and dubious local TV weathermen. But thanks to recent advances in computing and the reams of data we create through smartphone and Internet use, prediction models for individual behavior grow smarter and more sophisticated by the day. Whom you should marry, whether youll commit a crime or fall victim to one, if youll contract a specific strain of flueven your precise location at any given moment years into the futureare becoming easily accessible facts. The naked future is upon us, and the implications are staggering.
Patrick Tucker draws on stories from health care to urban planning to online dating to reveal the shape of a future thats ever more certain. In these pages youll meet scientists and inventors who can predict your behavior based on your friends Twitter updates. They are also hacking the New York City sewer system to predict environmental conditions, anticipating how much the weather a year from now will cost an individual farmer, figuring out the time of day youre most likely to slip back into a bad habit, and guessing how well youll do on a test before you take it. Youll learn how social networks like Facebook are using your data to turn you into an advertisement and why the winning formula for a blockbuster movie is more predictable than ever.
The rise of big data and predictive analytics means that governments and corporations are becoming much more effective at accomplishing their goals and at much less cost. Tucker knows thats not always a good thing. But he also shows how weve gained tremendous benefits that we have yet to fully realize.
Thanks to the increased power of predictive science, well be better able to stay healthy, invest our savings more wisely, learn faster and more efficiently, buy a house in the right neighborhood at the right time, avoid crime, thwart terrorists, and mitigate the consequences of natural disasters. What happens in a future that anticipates your every move? The surprising answer: well live better as a result.
Review
“This is a wondrously thought-provoking book. Unlike other social theorists who either mindlessly decry or celebrate the digital age, Rushkof f explores how it has caused a focus on the immediate moment that can be both disorienting and energizing.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
“Rushkoff gives readers a healthy dose of perspective, insight, and critical analysis thats sure to get minds spinning and tongues wagging.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In this refreshing antidote to promises of digital Utopia, Rushkoff articulates his own well-informed second thoughts. We should pay close attention—while we still can.”
—George Dyson, author of Turings Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines
“If you read one book next year to help you make sense of the present moment, let it be Present Shock.”
—Anthony Wing Kosner, Forbes.com
“Present Shock holds up new lenses and offers new narratives about what might be happening to us and why, compelling readers to look at the larger repercussions of todays technologically mediated social practices, from texting to checking in with a location-based service, jet-lag to The Simpsons, in new ways.”
—Howard Rheingold, author of Net Smart
“A wide-ranging social and cultural critique, Present Shock artfully weaves through many different materials as it makes its point: we are exhilarated, drugged, and consumed by the now. But we need to attend to the future before us and embrace the present in a more constructive way.”
—Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together
“With brilliant insight Rushkoff once again gets there early, making us confront the new world of ‘presentism—the shif t in our focus from the future to the present, from the horizon-gazing to the experience of here and now. He points to signs of presentism all around us—in how we conduct politics, interact with media, and negotiate relationships.”
—Marina Gorbis, executive director, Institute for the Future
Review
One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012
“Mr. Silver, just 34, is an expert at finding signal in noise… Lively prose — from energetic to outraged… illustrates his dos and donts through a series of interesting essays that examine how predictions are made in fields including chess, baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake analysis and politics… [the] chapter on global warming is one of the most objective and honest analyses Ive seen… even the noise makes for a good read.”
—New York Times
“Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.”
—New York Times Book Review
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction—without academic mathematics—cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism."
—New York Review of Books
"Mr. Silver's breezy style makes even the most difficult statistical material accessible. What is more, his arguments and examples are painstakingly researched..."
—Wall Street Journal
"Nate Silver is the Kurt Cobain of statistics... His ambitious new book, The Signal and the Noise, is a practical handbook and a philosophical manifesto in one, following the theme of prediction through a series of case studies ranging from hurricane tracking to professional poker to counterterrorism. It will be a supremely valuable resource for anyone who wants to make good guesses about the future, or who wants to assess the guesses made by others. In other words, everyone."
—The Boston Globe
"Silver delivers an improbably breezy read on what is essentially a primer on making predictions."
—Washington Post
“The Signal and the Noise is many things — an introduction to the Bayesian theory of probability, a meditation on luck and character, a commentary on poker's insights into life — but it's most important function is its most basic and absolutely necessary one right now: a guide to detecting and avoiding bullshit dressed up as data…What is most refreshing… is its humility. Sometimes we have to deal with not knowing, and we need somebody to tell us that.”
—Esquire
“[An] entertaining popularization of a subject that scares many people off… Silvers journey from consulting to baseball analytics to professional poker to political prognosticating is very much that of a restless and curious mind. And this, more than number-crunching, is where real forecasting prowess comes from.”
—Slate
“Nate Silver serves as a sort of Zen master to American election-watchers… In the spirit of Nassim Nicholas Talebs widely read “The Black Swan”, Mr. Silver asserts that humans are overconfident in their predictive abilities, that they struggle to think in probabilistic terms and build models that do not allow for uncertainty.”
—The Economist
"Silver explores our attempts at forecasting stocks, storms, sports, and anything else not set in stone."
—Wired
"The Signal and the Noise is essential reading in the era of Big Data that touches every business, every sports event, and every policymaker."
—Forbes.com
“Laser sharp. Surprisingly, statistics in Silvers hands is not without some fun.”
—Smithsonian Magazine
“A substantial, wide-ranging, and potentially important gauntlet of probabilistic thinking based on actual data thrown at the feet of a culture determined to sweep away silly liberal notions like ‘facts.”
—The Village Voice
“Silver shines a light on 600 years of human intelligence-gathering—from the advent of the printing press all the way through the Industrial Revolution and up to the current day—and he finds that it's been an inspiring climb. We've learned so much, and we still have so much left to learn.”
—MLB.com
Review
“Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century (a century we thought we’d be a lot better at predicting than we actually are). Our political discourse is already better informed and more data-driven because of Nate’s influence. But here he shows us what he has always been able to see in the numbers—the heart and the ethical imperative of getting the quantitative questions right. A wonderful read—totally engrossing.”
—Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
“Yogi Berra was right: ‘forecasting is hard, especially about the future.’ In this important book, Nate Silver explains why the performance of experts varies from prescient to useless and why we must plan for the unexpected. Must reading for anyone who cares about what might happen next.”
—Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge
“Making predictions in the era of ‘big data’ is not what you might imagine. Nate Silver's refreshing and original book provides unpredictably illuminating insights differentiating objective and subjective realities in forecasting our future. He reminds us that the human element is still essential in predicting advances in science, technology and even politics... if we were only wise enough to learn from our mistakes.”
—Governor Jon Huntsman
“Here's a prediction: after you read The Signal and the Noise, you'll have much more insight into why some models work well—and also why many don't. You'll learn to pay more attention to weather forecasts for the coming week—and none at all for weather forecasts beyond that. Nate Silver takes a complex, difficult subject and makes it fun, interesting, and relevant.”
—Peter Orszag, former director of the Office of Management and Budget
“Projection, prediction, assumption, trepidation, anticipation, expectation, estimation… we wouldn’t have 80 words like this in the English language if it wasn’t central to our lives. We tend not to take prediction seriously because, on some level, we know that we don’t know. Silver shows us how this inevitable part of life goes awry when projected on a grand scale into the murky worlds of politics, science and economics. Dancing through chess, sports, snowstorms, global warming and the McLaughlin Group, he makes a serious and systematic effort to show us how to clean the noise off the signal.”
—Bill James, author of The Bill James Baseball Abstracts
Review
“Contemplating the future—the very, very near future—of Big Data is by turns terrifying and exhilarating. Patrick Tucker captures both extremes and everything in between in this thorough yet thoroughly digestible book on the ubiquity of data gathering and the unraveling of personal privacy. This is a book powered by big ideas and enriched by expert storytelling.”
—DANIEL PINK, author of To Sell Is Human and Drive
“Any American who doesnt understand what big data has to do with everyday existence should read this book today. Whats at stake in The Naked Future is nothing short of free will itself.”
—DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“The Naked Future unveils a plausible future that is at once thought-provoking and rather unsettling. It seems inescapable.”
—VINT CERF, Internet pioneer
“Patrick Tuckers thought-provoking, eye-opening, and highly entertaining book The Naked Future skillfully illustrates how the intelligent analysis of big data is allowing us to see into the future with ever-increasing precision.”
—RAY KURZWEIL, author of How to Create a Mind
“A fantastic romp through the data-drenched world that is just around the corner. Patrick Tucker spots the trends shaping society and business, and tells the stories with verve and insight. The Naked Future exposes what we need to know about tomorrows world—to not be caught with our pants down!”
—KENNETH CUKIER, coauthor of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
Review
“Thought-provoking, eye-opening, and highly entertaining.”
—Ray Kurzweil, author of How to Create a Mind
Synopsis
If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.”
This is the moment weve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we dont seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit. And our failure to do so has had wide-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives.
People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, compile knowledge, and connect with anyone, at anytime. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed.
Well, the futures arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Rushkoff weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture. He explains how the rise of zombie apocalypse fiction signals our intense desire for an ending; how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; how corporate investing in the future has been replaced by futile efforts to game the stock market in real time; why social networks make people anxious and email can feel like an assault. He examines how the tragedy of 9/11 disconnected an entire generation from a sense of history, and delves into why conspiracy theories actually comfort us.
As both individuals and communities, we have a choice. We can struggle through the onslaught of information and play an eternal game of catch-up. Or we can choose to live in the present: favor eye contact over texting; quality over speed; and human quirks over digital perfection. Rushkoff offers hope for anyone seeking to transcend the false now.
Absorbing and thought-provoking, Present Shock is a wide-ranging, deeply thought meditation on what it means to be human in real time.
Synopsis
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century." Rachel Maddow, author of Drift Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hairs breadth, and became a national sensation as a bloggerall by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they goodor just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentaryand dangerousscience.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silvers insights are an essential read.
Synopsis
A futurists in-depth look at the promise and perils of forecasting An app on your phone knows youre getting married before you do. Your friends tweets can help data scientists predict your location with astounding accuracy, even if you dont use Twitter. Soon, well be able to know how many kids in a kindergarten class will catch a cold once the first one gets sick.
We are on the threshold of a historic transition in our ability to predict aspects of the future with ever-increasing precision. Computer-aided forecasting is poised for rapid growth over the next ten years. The rise of big data will enable us to predict not only events like earthquakes or epidemics, but also individual behavior.
Patrick Tucker explores the potential for abuse of predictive analytics as well as the benefits. Will we be able to predict guilt before a person commits a crime? Is it legal to quarantine someone 99 percent likely to have the superflu while theyre still healthy? These questions matter, because the naked future will be upon us sooner than we realize.
Synopsis
A thorough yet thoroughly digestible book on the ubiquity of data gathering and the unraveling of personal privacy.” Daniel Pink, author of Drive Thanks to recent advances in technology, prediction models for individual behavior grow more sophisticated by the day. Whether youll marry, commit a crime or fall victim to one, or contract a disease are becoming easily accessible facts. The naked future is upon us, and the implications are staggering.
Patrick Tucker draws on fascinating stories from health care to urban planning to online dating. He shows how scientists can predict your behavior based on your friends Twitter updates, anticipate the weather a year from now, figure out the time of day youre most likely to slip back into a bad habit, and guess how well youll do on a test before you take it.
Tucker knows that the rise of Big Data is not always a good thing. But he also shows how weve gained tremendous benefits that we have yet to fully realize.
About the Author
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, PH.D., is a world-renowned media theorist whose twelve books, including
Life Inc and
Program or Be Programmed, have won prestigious awards and have been translated into thirty languages. He is a commentator on CNN and a contributor to the
Guardian,
Discover, and NPR. He also made the PBS documentaries
The Merchants of Cool,
The Persuaders, and
Digital Nation. He advocates for digital literacy at Codecademy.com, and teaches at NYU and The New School. He lives in New York with his wife, Barbara, and daughter, Mamie.
Visit www.Rushkoff.com