An encouraging, unflinching look at the tech changes to come.
Fiore charts the rise of world-changing technologies in this nonfiction debut.
Whether we like it or not, technology is changing every aspect of human life. It isn’t just the way we work and eat, but increasingly the ways we conceive, age, and even think. “Where earlier innovations impacted workforce policies, social interaction, and lifestyle options,” writes Fiore in his introduction, “many future changes will involve internal tweaking in the form of edited genetic code, installation of organ implants, and monitoring systems to guide our diets, fitness regimens, and mental activities.” For Fiore, this is a cause for optimism. These innovations have the power to improve human life in myriad ways if they are employed responsibly and with the proper foresight. In short, innovators across society must remember, in Fiore’s parlance, to “put people first.” The book addresses some of these emerging technologies, including vertical farms, brain-computer interface systems that can restore sight to the blind, 3-D printed buildings, and sensors that monitor our health as part of a system of 24/7 telemedicine. Fiore analyzes the forces propelling these innovations, including the rise of automated systems, empowered consumers, and an evolving culture of corporate responsibility while also discussing the organizations charged with considering the possible societal outcomes for these shifts. Fiore’s people-first perspective covers everything from which skills will become obsolete or more valuable in the near future to the necessity of sharing new technologies evenly across the globe. As the author notes, there is no single person or committee responsible for policing technological innovation. He argues that it’s incumbent on all of us to educate ourselves about what is coming so that we can, as a society, innovate mindfully, beneficially, and equally.
Fiore is essentially a professional technology explainer, keeping abreast of new developments in order to advise people and companies on the future of work. His prose is clean and cheery, though he writes in a kind of motivational corporate-speak that may be alien, or simply annoying, to some readers: “Even as smart machines get better at task performance, we will need intelligent, thoughtful, well trained, and highly motivated people to draw on their domain knowledge, to innovate, to make sound ethical decisions, and to ask the right questions at this pivotal time for business, society, and humanity.” While the book describes some new technologies in detail, it’s mostly about the phenomenon of technological disruption. While technologies themselves are always going out of date, our relationship to innovation remains relatively fixed, even if innovation speeds up over time. Fiore succeeds in communicating this idea, offering a kind of “what to expect” for those stressed about the future. Specific changes are difficult to predict with certainty, but the author’s identification of certain trends, particularly regarding the nature of work and health care, are persuasive, and he contextualizes them in a way that makes them exciting rather than scary. For those looking for a glimpse at the future, this book isn’t a bad place to start.
An encouraging, unflinching look at the tech changes to come.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953943-06-4
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Rivertowns Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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