In the prologue, Gilder examines that computing was still largely in the 2-D flat universe system. Everyone seemed to be comfortable in flat land and the parallax relationships of near and far objects, angles and edges. The math all jibed. “Three dimensions?” you might ask. “I have no need for that hypothesis.” Under Google’s guidance, the Internet is not only full of unwanted ads but fraught with bots and malware. Instead of putting power in the hands of individuals, it has become a porous cloud where all the money and power rise to the top. The world of Google—its interfaces, its images, its videos, its icons, its philosophy—is 2-D. The internet is cracking under the weight of this ideology upholding the flat universe theory sufficient for deterministic chemistry and mathematics. They believe the human mind is a suboptimal product of random evolutionary processes. They believe in a silicon brain and that machines can learn in a way comparable to human learning, that consciousness is a relatively insignificant aspect of humanity, and that imagination of true novelties is a delusion in a hermetic world of logic.

Around the time of Back to the Future: The Ride in the early 1990s, Gilder was prophesying the end of television and the rise of the networked computers. In 1994, he was already prophesying the life after television be a digital cellular phone with an IP address which. He was a predicting that “The most common personal computer in the next decade will be a hand-held digital cellular phone with an IP address . . . connecting to thousands of data basis of all kinds.” “It will be as portable as your watch and as personal as your wallet; it will recognize speech and will navigate streets; it will collect your mail, your news, and your paycheck.” “It may not do windows, But it will do doors—your front door and your car door, and your doors of perception.” He later learned that long before the iPhone, Steve Jobs read the book and passed it out to colleagues.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin can fly off with Elon Musk and be walled off in their galactic walled garden. But the walls can come down, and a world of many new dimension can be ours to enrich and explore. Get in and ride.

Gilder argues that cloud computing, while it was the hot new technology ten years ago, has reached its limits as the physical limitations of big data storage centers maxes out. Improvements in parsing big data are incremental at this point, and it’s time for the next big technology to take its place.

Gilder points to blockchain as the technology of the future, with its ability to prevent corruption and manipulation of transaction data and the infinite uses it could have in third world countries.

Gilder also discusses the history of technology, artificial intelligence, and the revolutionary bitcoin. He argues that artificial intelligence can never replace human intelligence and creativity and that in principle it is impossible for machines to take over. He calls this temporal provincialism and myopia, exaggerating the significance of the attainments of their own  companies, their own special philosophies and chimeras—of themselves. AI is believed to be redefining what it means to be human, much as Darwin’s On the \Origin of Species did in its time. While Darwin made man just another animal, a precariously risen ape, Google-Marxism sees men as inferior intellectually to the company’s own algorithmic machines.

Security is not a benefit or upgrade that can be supplied by adding new layers of passwords, pony-tailed “swat teams,” intrusion detection schemes, anti-virus patches, malware prophylactics, and software retro-fixes. Security is the foundation  of all other services and crucial to all financial transactions. It is the most basic and indispensable component of any information technology.

In business, the ability to conduct transactions is not optional. It is the way all economic learning and growth occur. If your product is “free,” it is not a product, and you are not in business even if you can extort money from so-called advertisers to fund it. If you do not charge for your software services, don’t pretend that you have customers

Security is the most crucial part of any system. If security is not integral to an information technology architecture, that architecture must be replaced. The concentration of data in walled gardens increases the cost of security. The industry sough safety in centralization. But centralization is not safe.

It is time for a new information architecture for globally distributed economy. Fortunately it is on its way

This George Gilder “Life after Google” will be continued as “The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy.”

This book review will be posted at http://delmeyer.net/physicianpatient-bookshelf/.

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