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
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
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
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