Helpful advice to quell workers’ anxiety.
A technology journalist proposes future-oriented skills to prepare people for a new machine age.
To counter worry that artificial intelligence will make human workers obsolete, New York Times tech columnist Roose offers an upbeat, practical guide for dealing with “a world that is increasingly arranged by and for machines.” Rather than competing with machines by trying to work longer hours and beefing up technological knowledge, the author advises that humans should optimize skills that machines cannot emulate: “handling the unexpected,” for example; meeting “social and emotional needs”; and doing jobs “that involve novel circumstances, low-probability events, and rare combinations of skills.” AI is programmed to address “big data sets, large numbers of users, or huge quantities of inputs or outputs” but not to transfer knowledge from one problem to another. If people want to make themselves harder to replace, they should hone their ability to do things that require creativity, flexibility, and “human accountability.” Among the nine rules that Roose suggests for the future are a few that deliberately distance humans from technology: Wrest your attention from constantly checking your phone; curb “hustle tendencies” to overfill your schedule and drown yourself in work obligations; increase interaction with others by physical proximity, collaborative projects, and social videoconferences even if you work remotely; and speak up about “the potential stakes” of implementing AI and automation in your workplace. It’s crucial, Roose asserts, to keep humans involved in critical processes. Essential skills for the future include the ability to pay sustained attention (a skill undermined by the distractions of the internet); being able to hone emotional intelligence and empathy; media literacy; “treating other people well” and “acting ethically”; and becoming a “consequentialist,” applying critical thinking to evaluate the success or failure of AI processes and tools and “to analyze new products and imagine all the ways they could go wrong.”
Helpful advice to quell workers’ anxiety.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13334-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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