Excerpts: “Many of these apps fall into a category known as ‘robotic process automations,’ or RPA. Automation Anywhere, the company whose conference was detailed in this book’s introduction, is a major RPA vendor, but there are others you’ve probably never heard of, with names like UiPath, Blue Prism, and Kryon” (p. 53).

“In a 2019 paper, MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Boston University’s Pascual Restrepo coined the term ‘so-so technologies’ to describe the type of machine that is good enough to replace human workers but isn’t good enough to generate new jobs” (p. 56).

“Which means that humans who are good at handling the unexpected–who are cool in a crisis, who like dealing with messy problems and novel scenarios and who can move forward even in the absence of a concrete plan–still have an advantage” (p. 68).

“But we have to be careful about giving too much of ourselves to our tools. Because the philosophy that gives rise to machine drift is, fundamentally, nihilism. It’s an attempt to persuade us that there is nothing important about us that cannot be quantified or reduced to a series of data points, or any inner life worth protecting from machine influence” (p. 93).

“In their book Turning Point, Brookings Institution researchers John R. Allen and Darrell M. West propose requiring companies and government agencies to submit ‘AI impact statements,’ similar to the environmental impact statements developers have to submit before starting a new project” (p. 153).

“Instead, I prefer to talk about ‘digital discernment,’ which reflects the fact that learning to navigate our way through a hazy, lifelong online information ecosystem is a continuous, lifelong process that changes as technology shifts, and as media manipulators adapt to new tools and platforms” (p. 173).

“And while debunking internet misinformation is already hard, it’s going to get even harder in the coming years, with the rise of algorithmically generated text, realistic conversational AI, and synthetic video (‘deepfakes’) produced with the help of machine learning (p. 174).

Roose, Kevin. (2021). Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. New York: Random House.