A sweeping and authoritative look at the future of the tech-work connection.
A comprehensive guide focuses on adapting to machines of all kinds in the workplace.
Many readers encountering Uechi’s book will likely be horrified by its United States cover, which shows a group of humans working on some problem at a table—with glasses of water, cups of coffee, and an open laptop—right alongside a human-shaped robot with an expressionless face and a transparent skull. It’s a benign but stark picture of a future many people find terrifying, resembling a scene from the film I, Robot, starring Will Smith. But the author is well aware of this, and his wide-ranging work approaches the whole subject calmly and factually. After a brief survey of the growth of mechanization and automation, the manual explores the impact of technology on a handful of key industries, looking at the probable trends in those areas over the next 25 years. The world, he contends, is undergoing a civilization-level transformation that will move it into a new era, and in these pages, Uechi draws on his own experience as an IT manager to take readers through the likely workplace/tech developments up to 2046. His aim is to inform his readers and soothe their anxieties about things like the growing prevalence and sophistication of artificial intelligence. He goes into great detail under the headings of agriculture, manufacturing, construction, transportation, food services, health care, administration, and education—virtually every employment field that will affect most readers.
Everything from systems to sensors and robots comes in for a careful, painstaking examination in Uechi’s chapters, and he does a skillful, low-key job of breaking down a vast amount of research and technical information for general readers. His decision to spread his inquiry over such a large range of industries is a wise one, giving the broadest possible spectrum of readers some useful details on his predictions and extrapolations. This kind of decision goes hand in hand with his consistent and very convincing note of reassurance. He knows that many of his readers are worried that increasingly complex automation will threaten their jobs. While he's informing those readers of the facts and prospective trends, he’s also mindful of their fears. His steady, methodical approach is helpful—every chapter is segmented and buttressed with extensive notes in case readers involved in that section’s field want to research the topics further. The end result is a tranquil, remarkable, and indispensable guide even if some of the author’s extrapolations may be debatable. Occasionally, he is so diligent that he ends up sounding like an android himself. “Without a job, a person cannot earn income,” he computes at one point. “Without income, a person cannot buy and consume food and other products necessary to live.” But a certain amount of robotic style is probably inevitable in such a deep-dive approach to the complexities of industrial technology in all its endless facets, everything from pulse monitors to heavy grain loaders. The extent of Uechi’s research is genuinely impressive. Readers nervous about the future of their jobs and wanting to know the most likely ways that technology will change those positions will certainly want to read this book.
A sweeping and authoritative look at the future of the tech-work connection.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-203837-7
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Productivity Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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