The Future is Faster than You Think opens with a suitably futuristic scenario the authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler say is playing out right now: the arrival of flying cars. ‘By 2027 or so, you’ll be able to order up an aerial rideshare as easily as you do an Uber today,’ they predict, ‘And by 2030, urban aviation could be a major mode of getting from A to B.’
The financial system across the world is at a cusp of another major transformation due to innovations of information technology called fintech and the spread of Internet. In his book Fintech Future, Sanjay Phadke has very elaborately and logically explained the changes that are brought about by the fintech revolution in different parts of the world.
Recent headlines on global internet companies have been far from positive. Internet technology companies have been accused of a long list of excesses with immesuarble harm to their users and society at large. These accusations include outright fraud, issues of privacy, censorship, platforming hate speech, snooping on activists by governments, the weakening of democratic institutions, the spread of manufactured fake news, and throttling of market competition.
Written over three decades, Africa 2.0: Inside a Continent’s Communications Revolution by Russell Southwood could well be an ethnographic book. Southwood takes us through the journey of Africa since 1986 when all of sub-Saharan Africa had fewer phone lines than Manhattan in New York. If someone in Africa wanted a fixed-line telephone connection in 1986, it used to take a minimum of two years.
A new report by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), an association representing the mobile industry and its operators, on the state of mobile internet indicates an increasingly connected, if still woefully unequal, world.The report reveals that as of the end of 2021, 55% of the world’s population, or 4.3 billion people, were using mobile internet.
In the book The Modem World, Driscoll tells a coming-of-age story of the internet—he uses a crisp yet vivid narrative voice that has the potential to hook a techie and non-techie alike. The book fills an important gap in the cultural memory and theoretical literature of the internet by paying close attention to the Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).