Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Beatlemania: Why Are Success and Failure So Unpredictable?

“Why did the Beatles become a worldwide sensation? Why do some cultural products succeed and others fail? Why are some musicians, poets, and novelists, unsuccessful or unknown in their lifetimes, iconic figures decades or generation after their deaths? Why are success and failure so unpredictable?,” these are among the questions explored in Beatlemania, a draft paper by Harvard professor Cass Sunstein that will be published later this year in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Beatles Studies.

“On one view, the simplest and most general explanation is best, and it points to quality, appropriately measured: success is a result of quality, and the Beatles succeeded because of the sheer quality of their music,” wrote Sunstein. “On another view, social influences are critical: timely enthusiasm or timely indifference can make the difference for all, including the Beatles, leading extraordinary books, movies, and songs to fail even if they are indistinguishable in quality from those that succeed.”

In 1961 the Beatles  were an obscure English rock band from Liverpool, with no manager and modest prospects. They tried to release a debut single, Love Me Do, but every record label they approached rejected them and the band came close to splitting. In January of 1962 Brian Epstein became their manager. Epstein had no experience in managing artists, but he liked their music and sense of humor. He eventually persuaded EMI producer George Martin to audition the band in June of 1962, who despite feeling that they were “a rather raw group” with “not very good songs,” agreed to sign them to a recording contract.

How Do Young People See the World Compared to Older Generations?

“There is an emerging narrative about a growing intergenerational divide worldwide,” said a recent international survey conducted by The Changing Childhood Project. “In the media and in popular culture, the young are often portrayed as impatient, militant, outspoken, and even entitled, in contrast to more sober temperaments among older people. The concept of intergenerational tension is not new. What may be new, however, is the speed with which our world is changing – and with it, childhood.”

The Changing Childhood Project is a collaboration between UNICEF, - the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children around the world, - and Gallup, - the analytics company best known for its international opinion polls. Created to explore these intergenerational shifts, the project seeks to answer a few key questions: what is it like growing up today?; how do young people see the world differently?; and, is there an intergenerational gap?

The 2022 AI Index Report: AI’s Emerging Real-World Impact

On March 16, Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released the 2022 AI Index report, its fifth annual study on the impact and progress of AI. The comprehensive study was led by an interdisciplinary group of experts from across academia and industry, and highlights the rapid rate of technical and marketplace AI advances, as well as the growing ethical and regulatory concerns associated with AI.

“2021 was the year that AI went from an emerging technology to a mature technology - we’re no longer dealing with a speculative part of scientific research, but instead something that has real-world impact, both positive and negative,” said Jack Clark, co-chair of the AI Index. “This year’s AI Index tells us that AI is being integrated into the economy and the effects of it are beginning to go global across research, deployment, and even funding.” Two weeks ago I attended an online HAI seminar where Clark gave this excellent presentation on the AI Index.

The report is organized into five chapters: Technical Performance, AI Ethics, R&D, Economy and Education, and Policy and Governance. Let me summarize the key findings of each chapter.

The Tech Trends that Will Most Reshape Companies Over the Next Decade

“In the next decade, we’ll experience more progress than in the past 100 years combined, as technology reshapes health and materials sciences, energy, transportation, and a wide range of other industries and domains,” notes a recent McKinsey study on the The top trends in tech. “The implications for corporations are broad.”

“These trends may not represent the coolest, most bleeding-edge technologies. But they’re the ones drawing the most venture money, producing the most patent filings, and generating the biggest implications for how and where to compete and the capabilities you need to accelerate performance.”

“Unifying and underlying them all is the combinatorial effect of massively faster computation propelling new convergences between technologies; startling breakthroughs in health and materials sciences; an array of new product and service functionalities; and a strong foundation for the reinvention of companies, markets, industries, and sectors.”

What Is Web3, and Could It Usher a New Economic System?

Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 with the release of Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which explained how to design a decentralized cryptocurrency and digital payment system without the need for central banks or trusted intermediaries. Blockchain, the digital ledger for managing and certifying the validity of bitcoin transactions, was introduced in the same paper.

Over the years blockchain has transcended its original objectives, and has evolved in two major directions. One continues to focus on blockchain as the underlying platform for bitcoin, but it’s also become the platform for the large number of cryptocurrencies, digital tokens, and other cryptoassets that have since been created. The other is focused on the use of blockchain as a trusted distributed data base for private and public sector applications involving multiple institutions, such as supply chains, financial services and healthcare. The cryptocurrency camp is based on public permissionless blockchains, which anyone can join and require some kind of proof-of-work or proof-of-stake systems. The multi-institution camp is based primarily on private permissioned blockchains where participation is restricted to the institutions transacting with each other.

Given my professional interests, I’m particularly interested in the use of blockchains in business and public sector applications for two major reasons. First, I consider blockchain as a major next step in the continuing evolution of the Internet, helping us enhance the security of Internet transactions and data by developing a layer with the standard encrypted services for secure communication, storage and data access. And, longer term, blockchain technologies can significantly improve the efficiency, resilience, and management of complex global applications involving multiple institutions.

But, while I’ve been somewhat skeptical of the crypto camp, a number of intriguing crypto-related topics have recently captured my attention, including Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and especially Web3. These various topics were nicely explained by technology columnist Kevin Roose in The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto, an article in the March 20 SundayBusiness section of the NY Times.