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Too many CEOs tell a simple story about the future of work: if a machine can do what you do, your job will be automated. They envision everyone from doctors to soldiers rendered superfluous by ever-more-powerful AI. They offer stark alternatives: make robots or be replaced by them.
Another story is possible. In virtually every walk of life, robotic systems can make labor more valuable, not less. Frank Pasquale tells the story of nurses, teachers, designers, and others who partner with technologists, rather than meekly serving as data sources for their computerized replacements. This cooperation reveals the kind of technological advance that could bring us all better health care, education, and more, while maintaining meaningful work. These partnerships also show how law and regulation can promote prosperity for all, rather than a zero-sum race of humans against machines.
Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behaviorsilently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do soand to set limits on how big data affects our lives.
The conceit of The System is fiendishly clever and effective: Ball explains how each layer of the internet works, starting with the wires and working his way up the stack through protocol designers, governance, businesses, regulators, reformers and revolutionaries.
Each chapter is a mix of admirably clear explanations of often abstruse and technical systems, and keen-eyed profiles of representative individuals involved in them – storytelling and exposition, playing off against one another.
Paolo Nespoli and Roland Miller have tapped into this collective appetite with their new book, Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station, which is being published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of continuous human life aboard the ISS.