Thinkers: Tim O'Reilly on Achieving Techtopia

As the founder of O'Reilly Media, one of the tech industry's most prolific publishers, Tim O'Reilly popularized the terms open source and Web 2.0. He organizes conferences that both define and advance technology trends. In 2016, while developing one of these conferences--the Next:Economy Summit about the future of work--O'Reilly began to focus on the increasingly anxious discourse concerning allegedly biased algorithms, job-annihilating artificial intelligence, and social media–manipulating bots. In his new book, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, O'Reilly argues that the invisible hand of the market will not automatically brush these threats aside. He warns that to fend off instability and suffering on a global scale, companies need to give up their addiction to maximizing shareholder value at any cost and get back to building businesses that put customers first.