Jenny’s Reviews > Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation > Status Update

Futureproof examples: Bring home flowers for no reason, or read a book nobody else I know is reading. Turn off YouTube recs, and shop offline when possible. No email on Sundays. Send handwritten notes, or mentor a student, or send positive feedback to colleagues. Go into the office when possible. Join labor union. Meet with Civic Signals. Increase diversity of sources. Look into Fast Forward org.

Rule #9: Arm the rebels. You can choose to be like Thoreau (run away from tech and go into the woods) or be like Sarah Bagley (shape tech to be fairer and better). "Support the people fighting for ethics and transparency inside our most powerful tech institutions."

(2/2) Analog ethics a la "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" and social-emotional learning programs and the Kindness Curriculum; consequentialism and spotting flaws in tech systems before they cause catastrophic problems.

Rule #7: Build big nets [large-scale programs and policies that soften the blow of sudden unemployment shocks] and small webs [informal, local networks that support us during hardships]. Universal basic income is an increasingly attractive idea, perhaps "coupled with Medicare for All and generous unemployment benefits for workers who are displaced by automation."

Rule #6: Treat AI like a chimp army. Over-automating is a problem; even the best AI is still far from being worthy of making major corporate decisions about strategy and operations.

Rule #5: Don't be an endpoint [i.e., don't have a job that mainly takes directions from a machine or acts as a bridge between two or more incompatible machines]. People don't remain endpoints for long; their jobs disappear. Be especially careful as a remote worker. Regular, in-person contact with colleagues is still an advantage.

Yann LeCun, a godfather of deep learning: "Despite being a technologist himself, he said that the people with the best chances of coming out ahead in the economy of the future were not programmers and data scientists, but artists and artisans ... And in the future, he predicted, 'we're going to give more value to those [with human effort], and less and less value to material goods that are built by robots.'"

Rule #4: Leave handprints. Reject hustle culture, not only because it's bad for you, but because you can't possibly out-hustle an algorithm. The effort heuristic: a better indicator of value is how little tech, and how much human effort, is involved in producing something. Our humanity is worth more than our hustle.

Catherine Price: "Your life is what you pay attention to. If you want to spend it on video games or Twitter, that's your business. But it should be a conscious choice ... It's not really the phone. The phone is just the drug delivery device. The bigger issue is figuring out how to be alone with your own mind."

Sherry Turkle on phubbing, or phone snubbing, the act of avoiding interactions with someone in favor of using your phone: "[It is] a flight from conversation -- at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable."