Futureproof Quotes

“Did I really like cooking, or did I just like the way my Instagram photos of home-cooked meals made me look like a balanced, well-adjusted adult? How many of my beliefs and preferences were actually mine, I wondered, and how many had been put there by machines?”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“LeCun made an unexpected prediction about the effects all of this AI and machine learning technology would have on the job market. 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.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“Instead of trying to hustle our way to safety, we should do what Mitsuru Kawai did—refusing to compete on the machines’ terms, and focusing instead on leaving our own, distinctively human mark on the things we’re creating. No matter what our job is, or how many hours a week we work, we can practice our own version of monozukuri, knowing that what will make us stand out is not how hard we labor, but how much of ourselves shows up in the final product. In other words, elbow grease is out. Handprints are in.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“No matter how good AI [artificial intelligence] gets, humans still want role models, and we want to be inspired by human greatness. This is why we cheer for Olympic swimmers, even though speedboats go faster.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

“AI is better than humans at operating in stable environments, with static, well-defined rules and consistent inputs. On the other hand, humans are much better than AI at handling surprises, filling in gaps, or operating in environments with poorly defined rules or incomplete information.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“No matter what our job is, or how many hours a week we work, we can practice our own version of monozukuri, knowing that what will make us stand out is not how hard we labor, but how much of ourselves shows up in the final product.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have built sophisticated, planetary-scale machine-learning algorithms whose entire purpose is to generate engagement”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“Tech companies have spent decades profitably stripping friction out of our lives, making it easier to hail taxis, order household goods, or pay for things at a store, and frictionless design has become a kind of religious tenet for aspiring tech moguls.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“The book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was written in 1986 by a minister, Robert Fulghum, and it’s full of simple-sounding life advice, like “share everything,” “play fair,” and “clean up after your own mess.” Chen believes that these skills—the elementary, pre-literate skills of treating other people well, acting ethically, and behaving in prosocial ways, all of which I consider “analog ethics”—are badly needed for an age in which our value will come from our ability to relate to other people. He writes: While I know that we’ll need to layer on top of that foundation a set of practical and technical know-how, I agree with [Fulghum] that a foundation rich in EQ [emotional quotient] and compassion and imagination and creativity is the perfect springboard to prepare people—the doctors with the best bedside manner, the sales reps solving my actual problems, crisis counselors who really understand when we’re in crisis—for a machine-learning powered future in which humans and algorithms are better together. Research has indicated that teaching analog ethics can be effective. One 2015 study that tracked children from kindergarten through young adulthood found that people who had developed strong prosocial, noncognitive skills—traits like positivity, empathy, and regulating one’s own emotions—were more likely to be successful as adults. Another study in 2017 found that kids who participated in “social-emotional” learning programs were more likely to graduate from college, were arrested”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“idleness aversion.” Research has shown that being alone with our thoughts makes many of us profoundly uncomfortable, and that we generally even prefer physical pain to quiet solitude. In one experiment, conducted at the University of Virginia, college students were asked to sit alone in an empty room for a “thinking period” of ten to twenty minutes. They were also hooked up to electrodes, and told that if they wanted to, they could push a button to give themselves a painful electric shock. (They were under no obligation to give themselves the shock, and the experiment wouldn’t end sooner if they did—it was purely an optional way they could distract themselves from their boredom.) When the researchers looked at the results, they found that 71 percent of the men in the study and 26 percent of the women had shocked themselves at least once. The majority of the participants, confronted with the choice between sitting still and electrocuting themselves, had opted for the shock. “The untutored mind,” the researchers concluded, “does not like to be alone with itself.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“we may want to stop worrying about killer droids and kamikaze drones, and start worrying about the mundane, mediocre apps and services that allow companies to process payroll 20 percent more efficiently, or determine benefits eligibility with fewer human caseworkers.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“Workplace AI will not only hire and fire us, but guide our daily performance, correct us when we slip up, and praise us when we do good work. “Playing office politics” will come to mean “reverse-engineering a piece of workforce management software.” A “hostile work environment” might be the result of a poorly trained machine learning model rather than an abusive boss.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“We worry about Skynet, not spreadsheets. And when the change arrives, we’re often caught by surprise.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“The good news, and the reason I’m not totally skeptical of AI’s potential, is that we still have the power to determine how these technologies are developed. And if we do it right, the results could be incredible. Designed and deployed correctly, AI could help us eliminate poverty, cure disease, solve climate change, and fight systemic racism. It could move work to the periphery of our lives, and give us back time to spend with the people we love, doing the things that give us joy and meaning. The bad news, and the reason I’m not as optimistic as many of my friends in Silicon Valley, is that many of the people leading the AI charge right now aren’t pursuing those kinds of goals. They’re not trying to free humans from toil and hardship; they’re trying to boost their app’s engagement metrics, or wring 30 percent more efficiency out of the accounting department. They are either unaware of or unconcerned with the ground-level consequences of their work, and although they might pledge to care about the responsible use of AI, they’re not doing anything to slow down or consider how the tools they build could enable harm. Trust me, I would love to be an AI optimist again. But right now, humans are getting in the way.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“two economists, Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, have found that over the past several decades, automation has been destroying jobs faster than it has been creating them.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI

“The pandemic gave companies the cover they needed to make huge, unprecedented strides in automation without risking a backlash.”
― Kevin Roose, Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI