A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Chapter 6: The Protocol Principle

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1
. When I was writing my master’s thesis at MIT in the electrical engineering and computer
science department (the field Shannon created from scratch with his 1937 work), we
heard about Shannon’s spectacular student efforts. In retrospect, I’m not sure if this
was supposed to motivate us or demoralize us.
2
. For a more complete treatment of Claude Shannon, I recommend Jimmy Soni and Rob
Goodman’s fascinating 2017 biography, which was the source for much of the summary
that follows: A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).
3
. Information theorists would traditionally use the word code instead of protocol in this
instance, but for the sake of clarity in the discussion we’re having here, I’m going to use
protocol—as in a set of communication rules agreed on in advance—as it sidesteps the
colloquial associations people hold with respect to the word code.
4
. Though he didn’t have the mathematical framework required to quantify what he was
doing, Samuel Morse assigned the shortest possible encoding, a single dot, to “e,” the
most common letter in written English, in his famed telegraph communication
protocol, Morse code.
5
. Prior to Shannon, communication engineers dealt with interference on channels such as
telegraph or telephone wires by trying to make the signal stronger to overcome the
noise. Shannon showed the power of a digital approach, where you encode a single bit
using multiple bits, deployed using a clever code that allows you to reconstruct the
original bit even if many of those transmitted are corrupted with noise. This is how all
digital communication and storage mediums now work.
6
. More on the investment rounds of x.ai can be found in Kyle Wiggers, “X.ai’s AI Meeting
Scheduler Now Costs $8 per Month,” VentureBeat, October 10, 2018,
https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/10/x-ai-introduces-calendar-view-and-new-plans-
starting-at-8-per-month/
. The specific $26 million figure comes from my personal
conversations with Mortensen. Interestingly, as detailed in this article, Mortensen
eventually realized that having Amy communicate with natural language wasn’t actually
that important. The latest version of the product offers more structured interfaces for
meeting planning.
7
. Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun, “Stop the Meeting
Madness,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017,
https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness
.
8
. To elaborate on my use of part-time assistants, I do not, at the moment, have a
permanent assistant. I tend instead to bring on assistants temporarily to help during