book review of The-Know-It-Alls by Noam Cohen

The TKIA by Noam Cohen (amazon) is a critique of Silicon Valley and its leaders.

The main premise is that these leaders ideology - libertarianism - is in its essence bad and leads to the terrible reality that we live in now. 

The book covers 11 of the main players, past and present, beginning with John McCarthy (the inventor of AI), Lewis and Frederick Terman (the popularizer of IQ tests and Stanford provost that helped to connect academic research and industry in a way that was beneficial to Stanford and the few selected ones), Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Brin and Page, and ending with Mark Zuckerberg. I knew many of the life-stories the book brings. Perhaps it is because I was a grad student at Stanford with an office in now-demolished Fred Terman building (read the last two paragraphs of chapter on Fredrick Terman). Overall the book is well written and easy to read.

In my opinion, the thesis of the book is not well supported. It seems to me that the only one with real ideological drive was Peter Thiel who has real drive to change the world. The others are smart guys with business drive that made it. 

Inclusion of John McCarthy as the first in line and of Frederick Terman who successfully connected academic research and industry seems little far stretched.

One interesting point was how the IQ testing is the predecessor of all the quantification of human that the big companies do (collection of personal data to influence behavior). 

I often think about how far machines can learn human behavior and how well we can quantify human qualities such as smartness (IQ), or humor, and others. There have been many warning stories lately about discrimination that is present in some of machine learning algorithms (i'm thinking about algorithm (link) to predict probability of recidivism to help judges decide on setting bail is claimed to be racist (link) )