by Kevin Roose

From the introduction: “This is a book about how to be a human in a world that is increasingly arranged by and for machines. It’s an attempt to persuade you that the key to living a happy, rewarding life in the age of AI and automation is not competing with machines head-on […], but strengthening your uniquely human skills, so that you’re better equipped to do the things machines can’t do.”

It is absolutely crazy to me that a book on this topic did not draw heavily & explicitly from You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier. You Are Not a Gadget is written with the same mission that Roose articulates above, and it was one of my favorite reads of last year. There were multiple moments reading Futureproof where I said aloud to Liz “ok, he’s about to quote Jaron Lanier” - but not only does Roose never quote Lanier, Lanier doesn’t appear in the “further reading” list or even in the works consulted. I don’t presume that every author I read is as big a Lanier fan as I am, but given Kevin’s 8th rule—“Learn Machine-Age Humanities”—it seems peculiar to me that he excluded what I consider to be such a seminal work of Machine-Age Humanities from his sources.

Contextual awareness notwithstanding, the author does bring good ideas into the conversation. He does a great job explaining the nature of job automation: how job automation is not the product of 1:1 role replacement of humans by machines, but how work efficiencies created anywhere in a market or supply chain lead to work redundancy or decreased demand and other parts of the chain.

His chapters “Resist Machine Drift”, “Demote Your Devices” and “Don’t Be an Endpoint” are all great pieces of advice, and are very much worth reading. And in the chapter on Machine-Age Humanities, Roose lists some interesting (and important) machine-age humanist skills: Attention Guarding, Digital Discernment, and Consequentialism. But for other skills listed in that chapter—“Resting”, “Analog Ethics”, “Room Reading”—the conversation seems to confuse “the machine-age” with simply “today’s cultural moment” (hustle culture, wealth inequality, late-stage capitalism etc). Every cultural moment needs broad-spectrum cultural critics, but I think the topic confusion—or problem generalization—ultimately stunts the authors ability to offer insight on the specific problem of how to live alongside increasingly complex and powerful machines. All of these problems are interlinked! absolutely. But when the scope of conversation expands, I think it’s irresponsible not to mention it explicitly. The author cites (and has written about elsewhere) How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell; that book, is a great example of broad-spectrum cultural critique for today’s cultural moment.

I would have preferred a broader thesis, a more explicit attempt at analyzing the symbiosis between AI and our larger political economy. But as it is, Roose explains fairly technical concepts skillfully, in a way that (I think) non- technical people will be able to understand; a more ambitious philosophical undertaking might’ve stunted his project of bringing technical ideas down to the pedestrian level, which was a noble (and successful) project of the book.