Richard Whittle – författare

A fascinating and authoritative narrative history of the V-22 Osprey, revealing the inside story of the most controversial piece of military hardware ever developed for the United States Marine Corps.When the Marines decided to buy a helicopter-airplane hybrid “tiltrotor” called the V-22 Osprey, they saw it as their dream machine. The tiltrotor was the aviation equivalent of finding the Northwest Passage: an aircraft able to take off, land, and hover with the agility of a helicopter yet fly as fast and as far as an airplane. Many predicted it would reshape civilian aviation. The Marines saw it as key to their very survival. By 2000, the Osprey was nine years late and billions over budget, bedeviled by technological hurdles, business rivalries, and an epic political battle over whether to build it at all. Opponents called it one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history. The Marines were eager to put it into service anyway. Then two crashes killed twenty-three Marines. They still refused to abandon the Osprey, even after the Corps’ own proud reputation was tarnished by a national scandal over accusations that a commander had ordered subordinates to lie about the aircraft’s problems. Based on in-depth research and hundreds of interviews, The Dream Machine recounts the Marines’ quarter-century struggle to get the Osprey into combat. Whittle takes the reader from the halls of the Pentagon and Congress to the war zone of Iraq, from the engineer’s drafting table to the cockpits of the civilian and Marine pilots who risked their lives flying the Osprey—and sometimes lost them. He reveals the methods, motives, and obsessions of those who designed, sold, bought, flew, and fought for the tiltrotor. These stories, including never before published eyewitness accounts of the crashes that made the Osprey notorious, not only chronicle an extraordinary chapter in Marine Corps history, but also provide a fascinating look at a machine that could still revolutionize air travel.

The convergence of Algorithms, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the current world of work. This book investigates the effects of this on the worker, the organisation and the economy, by considering a future where the traditional power relationships between workers and firms no longer apply. Using the term “Bitwork” to define this future world of work, the book proposes the idea of the Bitworker who is highly flexible, holds multiple roles, and has multiple incomes. Chapters consider the potential winners and losers of this technological pivot by exploring implications such as: the expanding array of currencies; training and education; retirement and loyalty; profit and power within organizations; economic policy. The book’s comprehensive recommendations on how workers, organisations and nation states will need to adapt to prosper in this new world, provide a useful survival guide for researchers, practitioners and policy makers working on behavioural economics, economic policy and the future of work.

The convergence of Algorithms, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency has the potential to fundamentally disrupt the current world of work. This book investigates the effects of this on the worker, the organisation and the economy, by considering a future where the traditional power relationships between workers and firms no longer apply. Using the term “Bitwork” to define this future world of work, the book proposes the idea of the Bitworker who is highly flexible, holds multiple roles, and has multiple incomes. Chapters consider the potential winners and losers of this technological pivot by exploring implications such as: the expanding array of currencies; training and education; retirement and loyalty; profit and power within organizations; economic policy. The book’s comprehensive recommendations on how workers, organisations and nation states will need to adapt to prosper in this new world, provide a useful survival guide for researchers, practitioners and policy makers working on behavioural economics, economic policy and the future of work.