About a week ago, long-time Sloper Dutch suggested I check out a book by well-known economist and technology author George Gilder named Life After Google. Based on the strength of this recommendation, I purchased it right away, and I spent the entire weekend reading it. I wanted to share my thoughts about it with you. Before I do, I’m going to be lazy and provide the summary of the book from the Amazon site:

The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns.

Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads.