Book Summary: Machine Platform Crowd

Key points

Trends

Machine: getting to human level intelligence
- versus human mind
Platform: Facebook and AirBnb dominating their verticals with none of the traditional assets
- versus products
Crowd: crowd sourcing of ideas and value
- versus core – knowledges, processes, expertise, and capabilities companies have built over their supply chain

Machine Age phases

Phase 1: take over large amounts of routine work. mid-1990s
Phase 2: stuff of science fiction, performing non-routine work like self-driving. now

Machine versus human

Psychology – Daniel Kahneman
- Fast thinking (intuition)
  - used as data point
  - show it lots of examples and give it frequent and rapid feedback about accuracy
- Slow thinking (deliberate)
  - come to conclusion with it but taking data point from intuition
Proposed reversal:
- machine take human judgement as input
- instead of machine presenting data to human for judgement
Kids learn with no priorly defined rules
entrepreneurship very rewarding to individuals and societies
- Machines not very good at large scale creativity and planning
- humans are really good at it

Platform

Unbundling of offerings
Curation counters the corruptors
- reputation system
- keep out bad and encourage good
High reputation beats high similarity – stranger-danger biases
Information asymmetry leads to market breakdown

Crowd versus Core

new knowledge is constantly created
new knowledge slow to enter into core
Need core principals for crowd to come together to build things of great value
- openness
- noncredentialism
core is often mismatched for the problems its most interested in
- knowledge comes from domain far away from problem itself
unbundling of the firm
managers fall back on process of iteration and experimentation
- avoid biases and judgments
how technology is used is more important than how easy it is to access it

References

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
Why Fintech who kill Banks?