Unnervingly convincing evidence that time is running out in the “gray war” with the enemies of freedom.
Disturbing news about the wireless world.
Helberg, senior adviser at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology, spent four years at Google trying to eliminate disinformation from its search engine. In the process, he discovered that world autocracies, led by Russia and China, are conducting a cyberwar with democracies, and winning. In 2016, “on election night, the trolls in St. Petersburg popped champagne, toasted one another, and crowed, ‘We made America great.’ ” Helberg reminds readers that, 20 years ago, pundits proclaimed that the internet’s unstoppable freedom of expression would destroy autocracies. Few say that now. The internet has instead accelerated “truth decay,” where the click of a mouse supports any outlandish opinion. Those who suspect that illegal immigrants started this summer’s forest fires need only search for the terms “forest fires” and “immigrants” to discover that they have plenty of misinformed company. Though the U.S. has largely controlled the internet’s expansion, builds most of the storage and transmission infrastructure, and makes the rules, its leadership days are numbered. China’s Huawei, by far the world’s largest telecom company, dominates 5G, the revolutionary successor to today’s network that will vastly accelerate data and phone transmission. Furthermore, Chinese manufacturers make “a staggering 90 percent of the world’s mobile phones.” In his how-to-fix-it conclusion, the author emphasizes that America’s “digital defense of democracy” must become a national security priority. The U.S. must also establish a “Western 5G alternative,” massively increase technical aid to developing countries, and promote cyber sanctions to protect the free internet. Helberg is entirely correct in his assessment that this will require overhauling science and engineering education and expanding government-business cooperation, all of which will lead to a modern “Sputnik moment” similar to that following the 1957 Soviet satellite launch, which ended in triumph when the U.S. landed an astronaut on the moon.
Unnervingly convincing evidence that time is running out in the “gray war” with the enemies of freedom.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982144-43-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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