How to Stay Smart in a Smart World by Gerd Gigerenzer

How to Stay Smart in a Smart World by Gerd Gigerenzer

How to stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms that beat us in chess, find us romantic partners, and tell us to turn right in 500 yards.

Doomsday prophets of technology predict that robots will take over the world, leaving humans behind in the dust. Tech industry boosters think replacing people with software might make the world a better place--while tech industry critics warn darkly about surveillance capitalism. Despite their differing views of the future, they all seem to agree: machines will soon do everything better than humans. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, Gerd Gigerenzer shows why that's not true, and tells us how we can stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms.

Machines powered by artificial intelligence are good at some things (playing chess), but not others (life-and-death decisions, or anything involving uncertainty). Gigerenzer explains why algorithms often fail at finding us romantic partners (love is not chess), why self-driving cars fall prey to the Russian Tank Fallacy, and how judges and police rely increasingly on nontransparent black box algorithms to predict whether a criminal defendant will reoffend or show up in court. He invokes Black Mirror, considers the privacy paradox (people want privacy but give their data away), and explains that social media get us hooked by programming intermittent reinforcement in the form of the like button. We shouldn't trust smart technology unconditionally, Gigerenzer tells us, but we shouldn't fear it unthinkingly, either.

Gerd Gigerenzer is a partner of Simply Rational--The Institute for Choices and the director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He is the coeditor of Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox and Heuristics and the Law, both published by the MIT Press, and the author of Calculated Risks, among other books.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262046954
ISBN 10	0262046954
Title	How to Stay Smart in a Smart World
Author	Gerd Gigerenzer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2022-08-02
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.