As a starry-eyed engineer working in my first company I came across a book called Being Digital by the then Director of the MIT Media Lab, Nicolas Negroponte. As a starry-eyed young engineer, I came across a book called Being Digital by the then Director of the MIT Media Lab, Nicolas Negroponte.
Published in 1995, just as the Internet was leaving its hidden places in academia and government, and as a thing sitting on top of that strange soup of protocols called “The World Wide Web” and viewed through something called a “browser” was emerging into the mainstream. It’s a relatively short book (250 pages or so), but it correctly envisioned everything from online commerce to digital butlers (which is AI today). I was always struck by one passage:
"But just as elevators have changed the shape of buildings and cars have changed the shape of cities, bits will change the shape of organizations, be they companies, nations, or social structures."