Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez

Take one particular example: autonomous vehicles, or self-driving cars. What struck me is that literally every company is basically taking some part of either white-collar or blue-collar work and replacing it with automation. Garcia-Martinez: I go to the Demo Day for Y Combinator, which is this accelerator in Silicon Valley that’s fathered a lot of companies, and that my company went through. Realistically, we’re still in maybe the first couple of innings of a baseball game right now, with so much more change possible. : We’ve seen a lot of this change happen over the past 10 to 15 years. The question we really have as a society is, how robust are we to the chaos monkeys and what they are doing to our society? Right now, Silicon Valley to me, is almost like this gaggle of chaos monkeys that’s testing society. Everyone with a spare bedroom can actually become a hotelkeeper. They run around and they pull the plug on taxis and say, “Look, everyone could be a taxi driver now, thanks to Uber.” Or they say, “We’re not going to have hotels anymore. These days, Silicon Valley is the zoo where the chaos monkeys are kept. The image you should have is this wild monkey rampaging through a data center, knocking out computers. They test whether they can actually still stream, for example, House of Cards. What it does is, it literally shuts down their own servers. : What are the characteristics that make “chaos monkeys” stand out?Īntonio Garcia-Martinez: Chaos Monkey is actually a piece of software that Netflix created. Originally appeared on, we republish here with permission. Garcia-Martinez joined us on Knowledg Show on Sirius XM channel 111 to talk about his book, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. In a new tell-all book, Antonio Garcia-Martinez uses his experience as a startup founder/CEO of AdGrok, a Facebook product manager, and a twitter advisor to provide readers with a look inside Silicon Valley.

Chaos Monkeys by Antonio García Martínez