Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

if not most, benefit from being exposed to different perspectives—to people and teams, in other words, with multiple dissimilar backgrounds, educations, problem-solving approaches, intellectual and technical tool kits, genders, and so on. This is absolutely the definition of the crowd, and

Linux is without question the biggest and most professional operating system in the world, today found on everything from the servers in data centers bigger than a football field to over 1.5 billion Android phones and tablets.

pure engineering, aided by statistical modeling based on gigantic amounts of raw data. . . . I not only didn’t

One is that important new knowledge is being created constantly in almost all disciplines, and that knowledge can be slow to enter the core.

using technology to complement human labor is Iora Health, which (as we discussed in Chapter 5) employs health coaches.

Google changed the world with the realization that even though the crowd’s online content was uncontrolled, it wasn’t disorganized. It, in fact, had an extremely elaborate and fine-grained structure, but not one that was consciously decided on by any core group of humans. Instead, it was a structure that emerged from

Earth could this philosophy of radical and permanent decentralization ever be reconciled with the absolute need for a single, permanent, universally trusted ledger?

When such rapid progress is occurring, the knowledge of the core in organizations within these industries can easily become out of date.

They surmised that these links could be used to build an index of all the content out there—one where the “best” page on a given topic was the one that had the most other pages linking to it.