Uma Vanka’s new book is The Future is BIG: How Emerging Technologies Are Transforming Industry and Societies. As the title would suggest, the book is an exposé on the technological boom, if not out and out singularity, that may be due in a frightening fast period of time. Vanka’s intention is to make this considerable phenomenon, much less than hypothetical, as intellectually palatable as possible for the widest possible audience.
There’s never the sense Future is BIG is trying to justify its expertise on what it speaks, even some of the best books are guilty of this fault. Because of Vanka’s self-assuredness, he can concentrate solely on the communication factor – clearly and concisely narrating a steady set of progressions, scenarios, hypotheses, and predicted outcomes with chillingly three-dimensional insight, and this kind of casual, matter-of-fact straightforwardness that makes the initiated and the educated on this topic’s flesh crawl. It’s not that what Vanka speaks of is something to out-and-out fear. There are considerable ramifications at play here, not just in terms of what the pros and cons of the technology advancements promise immediately, but also to consider in an economic, employment, social class, and workplace hierarchal context.
Vanka writes on all of this with a deliberately simplistic house style, so the concepts stand for themselves and the reading experience doesn’t require the target audiences and the uninitiated to parson out the meaning between the words. Often books of this nature seem to pride themselves on being intellectually exclusive. It sort of forms the identity and the grail upon which these works rest upon. A certain kind of implacability, a removal. Vanka doesn’t have time for this. The matters at play are too pressing, too severe, and require a fast understanding so everyone has a chance to adapt to an increasingly digitized, technocentric landscape. It’s not a matter of whether things will happen, Vanka brilliantly demonstrates time and again things are simply inevitable.
“The rationale behind my writing this book is simple. I want the inexperienced and the freshly baked out to revisit simplicity to keep up with the frontlines of bleeding-age technology. I’ve tried to keep everything simple and authenticate my data and facts through citations from trusted sources. And these sources are not books found in big libraries only the big brains can access. Anyone can instantly access them without even a subscription for the first few visits, at least most of them. Feel free to note these sources—the ones that interest you,” Vanka writes, near the beginning of the read.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Future-BIG-Technologies-Transforming-Societies-ebook/dp/B0C15Q4FZ6
He also states, “Learning is akin to night sky watching. With only a quick sweep at the feeble stars, you can narrow down on the interesting ones. That’s the extensive. You ‘jack’ the extensive—that’s your interest gnawing on the available knowledge, expecting to witness more details of the stars. If you’re keen enough to zoom through a telescope, you’ll see galaxies of stars stuffed in that very single dot. And that’s the intensive. Without an extensive view of things in your discipline, intensive exercises mean nothing more than drilling a nail into the hardest spot on the wall.”
Garth Thomas