The Lifelogger: Recording Every Moment of a Life
Remember when we used to collect all sorts of things: stamps, napkins, postcards, photos… even memories? The year is 2000. One of the great scientists of his time begins an unusual experiment. Day and night he will wear a camera around his neck that records every moment of his daily life. The idea is to miss nothing! His life will be captured and duly documented, so he can go back to any moment of it, and why not… one day relive it virtually? Gordon Bell is a world-famous computer scientist, and one of the most prestigious awards in computing bears his name. But the experiment he undertook—recording every second of his life—gives us far more today than his scientific research. One way or another, it shows where we are all headed. His idea sounds like a joke… because it has already become everyday practice. Yes, we leave a huge trail online of every minute we live. And it doesn't impress us, doesn't please us, doesn't even make us ask what the consequences might be. Do you dream of remembering every important moment of your life? The first kiss, your newborn's first smile, that unforgettable meeting that showed you how to change your life? Today it is easier than ever. And at the same time harder, more challenging, even… more dangerous.
22How YouTube Was Meant to Be Tinder: Three Programmers and $1.65 Billion
How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Probably depends on how motivated they are. But you'll be surprised to learn that just three are enough to create… YouTube. In the beginning it was quite different, because the platform that became a synonym for video content was originally supposed to be a dating site. Three former PayPal employees launched the project in early 2005, and less than two years later Google bought it for $1.65 billion! Here is the little-known, twist-filled story of one of the giants of the digital world. Of the site that made video unimaginably easy to share. Of the project that for many years ranked among the three most visited pages on the planet.
23On the Tenth Day, Brendan Created JavaScript…
You know, one mythical figure created the world in a week. Brendan Eich took a little longer—10 days—to create another new world we all live in… JavaScript. Here is the cautionary tale of how a man who landed almost by accident at the epicenter of events built something enormous, and how, in fast-moving technological times, fate can turn a hero into an outsider in the blink of an eye. console.log(“Here we go!”);
24Sam Altman, the Father of ChatGPT
Have you heard of Sam Altman? The famous ChatGPT owes its success to him; he runs OpenAI, the company that showed the world how far artificial intelligence has come. By all signs, he will be the next big name. He will make the Silicon Valley news that echoes around the world. His few interviews are worth listening to closely as we look for the big news coming in the world of artificial intelligence. A programmer who never quite happened, an entrepreneur who has seen both success and failure up close. An innovator who landed in exactly the right place. A visionary without grand words. An American of Jewish descent, the first leader on such a scale who makes no secret of being gay. This figure, still hidden behind the chatbot, has yet to give birth to big stories and big changes. And conspiracy theories, everything that comes with his status. Not long ago he set aside from his “savings” two sums of hundreds of millions of dollars each and gave them to research into dramatically extending human life and the search for cold fusion—a technology that could solve humanity's energy needs for the long term…
25The Programmer Who Turned Down $10 Billion
Jason Citron knows all too well what it means to fail. He has done it many times, spectacularly, losing serious money. That was before he created Discord, the next-generation social network that long ago outgrew the world of gaming and became a convenient and secure means of communication, free of many of the flaws of traditional platforms. But how did the programmer come to turn down an offer of… 10 billion dollars from Microsoft?! What failures did Jason go through before reaching his enormous success? What are the most important things he has to tell us, and the key lessons of his fascinating story?
26Tristan Harris: The Knight of Honest Technology
“The closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”—that is how Tristan Harris is known. His name made headlines with the notorious film The Social Dilemma, which drew plenty of attention but never led to much real change. His work embodies everything that is “broken” in today’s online life: the manipulative practices that have become a threat to our future as a species. Tristan Harris is not only the most recognizable champion of a free and democratic internet. Not only a thorough researcher who draws attention to the ways we are manipulated. He is also the man who warned a decade ago that the path technology was taking would lead us into a world of mammoth companies more powerful than the largest states. Into a time when we can no longer hold our attention while reading. Into filter bubbles that grotesquely distort the way we get our information. Does he think we can reverse these trends? Can the internet become a free place without monopolies, where information is delivered democratically, with respect for the personal data and views of every user… What are his ideas for the future of the web?
27Lex Fridman, the Cool Scientist
A slightly dry young man in a thin tie and an impeccable suit sits behind the microphone, and across from him, one after another, come Musk, Zuckerberg, Kanye West, Vitalik Buterin, Noam Chomsky, Jaron Lanier and leading scientists from the world of artificial intelligence. Lex Fridman has been one of the most popular podcasters of recent months, even though by profession he is a scientist, an artificial intelligence researcher and a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born and raised in Moscow, of Jewish-Ukrainian descent, today he says he is American and speaks English without an accent. That does not stop him from blaming his new homeland for all the wars it wages around the world, just as he blames the old one. Lex is more than an interesting bird because of his successes. Here is what else is worth learning from his very curious story.
28WordPress: The Matt Who Set the Internet to Jazz
In 2003, 19-year-old Matt Mullenweg found out firsthand that necessity is the mother of invention. He was using a free blogging platform and needed a little help, but there was no one to give it. The result, born on April 1 and no joke at all, was WordPress, the open-source platform that lets anyone build a good-looking site with minimal effort. Today WordPress carries on its shoulders… a third of the world's web pages! But what does jazz have to do with any of it? This story from two decades ago is as meaningful as it is full of colorful details.
29The Slack Revolution: A $27,700,000,000 Lesson
Stewart Butterfield is the man with the most reason to buy everyone a round for the way the pandemic changed our lives. Never heard of him? He's well worth knowing: the father of Slack has an instructive story that runs through the different eras of the internet to remind us that even when life is going well… sometimes the stunning success you've spent so long preparing for finally arrives. And do you know his secret? It lies in the conclusions he drew from the failure of one of his computer games, a full 30 years earlier…
30Geoffrey, the Man Who Gave the Computer a Brain
Neural networks, artificial intelligence… we repeat these terms every day without stopping to think how closely they are tied to the idea of software that mimics the human brain. That is no accident; the association is logical. The first person not only to think of it but to put it into practice is today's hero, one of the greatest scientists of our time. We owe Geoffrey Hinton a huge share of the progress we see today in the ever-so-topical field of artificial intelligence.
31The McAfee Who Refused to Go Quietly
He claimed to have 47 children and twice tried to become president of the United States. He said he would never kill himself, and that if such news ever appeared, it would mean the authorities had murdered him. Then that news appeared, and it turned out to be true. The creator of McAfee, the first mass-market antivirus program, John McAfee is a favorite figure for connoisseurs of powerful stories, and for conspiracy lovers too. His life was an endless party, more strangely bohemian than anyone else's in the world of Silicon Valley. A little Steve Jobs, a little Donald Trump and a little Mityo Pishtova, the swaggering braggart of Bulgarian popular lore, fused into an explosive alloy.
32Sundar Pichai, the Millionaire Who Grew Up Poor
Do you know the name of Google's boss? And if you happen to have heard it, do you know his story? Sundar Pichai was born in India exactly 50 years ago, grew up far from luxury and first got access to a computer only after leaving to study in the United States, then boldly climbed the ladder to the top of one of today's biggest companies while staying out of the spotlight his peers enjoy. What else is worth knowing about him?
33And Yet… Who Really Is Elon Musk?
You may even be tired of seeing his name in the news. He is the undisputed superstar of our time, and just about everyone has tried their hand at portraying his endlessly curious persona. And yet, let us try to peer into the heart of all the major contradictions that Elon Musk holds within himself. We will look further back into his story in search of his true face: where his road begins, what his remarkable successes are… and his failures. What does he promise us for the future? In today’s public space, torn apart by extreme contradictions, the nuances are increasingly lost. And it is precisely in them that the key lies.
34The Dreamer Who Should Have Been Bill Gates
“It was not a happy moment when I realized that computers were being built to make money, not to make minds,” says Gary Kildall. He wrote the first operating system for personal computers. And, according to legend, he let slip the golden contract with IBM that could have put him at the top of the software world—the place Bill Gates and Microsoft won instead. He is, without a doubt, a legend of the computer age. He died at just 52, but left an enormous mark on computer history.
35The Programmer Who Sent Humans to the Moon
The woman in the photo is Dr. Margaret Hamilton, head of the team that built the software that carried Apollo 11 to our night luminary, the mission that took the first humans to the Moon in 1969. And that stack of binders? It's the software Margaret and her team wrote. What were the biggest challenges back when the profession of software engineer didn't even exist yet?
36The Digital Prophet Who Came to Hate the Internet
“You are not the customer of the internet giants, you are their product.” “Social media is worse than cigarettes. Cigarettes don’t make you degrade. They kill you, but you still remain yourself.” You will hardly believe that these words belong to one of the pioneers of today’s digital world. Jaron Lanier popularized the term “virtual reality” and created the concept of avatars. His path crossed those of Richard Feynman, Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol. For a long time he was at the height of fame, on first-name terms with Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin and Bill Gates. In a single afternoon he personally showed his pioneering virtual reality goggles to the Dalai Lama, Leonard Bernstein and Terry Gilliam. And today he is a preacher of sorts, speaking out against the flaws of the digital world.
37The Beauty Who “Invented” Wi-Fi
They called Hedy Lamarr “the most beautiful actress in Hollywood.” And also… “the inventor who made Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS possible.” Was her invention really so important that it… could have ended World War II sooner, and how did she find time for it between six marriages and a dazzling Hollywood career? A story like a film from the analog age that turned out to matter for the digital one.
38Linus the Lionheart
“Nobody has ever told me I'm cool. I'm just the thing halfway between a normal person and a tech geek,” says Linus Torvalds. The computer engineer is surely one of the heroes of today's online world: the projects he created, Linux and Git, laid much of the groundwork for life on the internet as we know it. What kind of man is Linus? How does fame sit with him? And what does it feel like to start… an accidental revolution?
39Uncle Bob, the Programmers' Much-Hated Moses
Robert Martin, or simply Uncle Bob, is an iconic figure in the history of programming. He formulated the SOLID principles, which every beginner programmer is expected to know by heart at their first job interview. Uncle Bob is also one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, which changed work in the industry forever. So why doesn't he enjoy the fame he deserves today?
40Who Are You, Satoshi Nakamoto?
People drawn to the blockchain have been asking this question for a decade now. Why did the creator of bitcoin vanish, and what did he leave behind before he withdrew? We follow the clues Satoshi Nakamoto left in search of his true face, and of one of the most thrilling stories of the digital age.
