Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

Written by Christopher Steiner

Narrated by Walter Dixon

The rousing story of the last gasp of human agency and how today's best and brightest minds are endeavoring to put an end to it.

It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills-and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These “bots” started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.

In this fascinating, frightening audiobook, Christopher Steiner tells the story of how algorithms took over-and shows why the “bot revolution” is about to spill into every aspect of our lives, often silently, without our knowledge.

The May 2010 “Flash Crash” exposed Wall Street's reliance on trading bots to the tune of a 998-point market drop and $1 trillion in vanished market value. But that was just the beginning. In Automate This, we meet bots that are driving cars, penning haiku, and writing music mistaken for Bach's. They listen in on our customer service calls and figure out what Iran would do in the event of a nuclear standoff. There are algorithms that can pick out the most cohesive crew of astronauts for a space mission or identify the next Jeremy Lin. Some can even ingest statistics from baseball games and spit out pitch-perfect sports journalism indistinguishable from that produced by humans.

The interaction of man and machine can make our lives easier. But what will the world look like when algorithms control our hospitals, our roads, our culture, and our national security? What happens to businesses when we automate judgment and eliminate human instinct? And what role will be left for doctors, lawyers, writers, truck drivers, and many others?

Who knows-maybe there's a bot learning to do your job this minute.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Sep 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469085425

Reviews for Automate This

[kropferama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Automate this looks at how algorithms were first used for stock trading and moves into a narrative of now automated data processing is being used for It used to diagnose an illness, write music or pick the next pop music hit, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article. Areas you may have thought were exclusively human are now open to contributions from bots.
Automated decision making can be amazing for humans so long as there is human intervention.

[antao-3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 2012-08-04)There has been a long tradition of defining intelligence to be whatever machines can't do at the time. The recent book "Automate This: How Algorithms came to rule our world" by Christopher Steiner gives a good overview of many of the fields in which computers have achieved or surpassed human performance, whether in game play [2018 EDIT: (Chess (Deep Blue), Jeopardy (Watson))], medical prescriptions (diagnosis and fulfillment) or even music (judging potential, composing). In particular the latter seems to engender interesting reactions in many people. When algorithmically composed music is performed to unsuspecting audiences, many find the music some of the most moving they have heard. When told that it was not composed by a human, many will find that the music seems hollow and lacks a certain quality or soul (even some of the very same people who before raved about it).It's a bit like the borderline of religious faith and science. The belief that there must be something not yet understood to make intelligence what it is common. To invoke the realm of quantum physics is just a desperate attempt. Intelligence is not a physics problem, it is a computer science problem. It raises interesting philosophical, ethical and legal questions, such as with self-driving cars. But that doesn't change the fact that we can build self-driving cars and that they really understand what it takes to navigate safely through their environment.Self-awareness is indeed an interesting phenomenon - although it is not required for many of the things even Deutsch pointed out, such as the insight that there are infinitely many prime numbers. I suspect that self-awareness is the result of an entity building a sophisticated enough model of its environment to include itself in that model and reason about it. Higher animals are capable of it (passing the mirror test), many others are not (for example some fish attacking their mirror image). To some extent self-driving cars may come close to that as they include themselves in their model of the environment. This is an interesting field for modern robotics.Overall, I don't think it is all that desirable to mimic human intelligence and all its evolutionary history of lower brain functions and sometimes evil behavior (rage, rape, murder, etc.). The more interesting question is how a world will look like in which most tasks requiring intelligent behavior previously reserved only to humans will be performed by machines - just like today most tasks requiring mechanical force are automated. What will humans do with all these intelligent servants around?There might be an initial unethical (over disciplinary) period where makers try to enforce obedience, but if you read the histories of different groups (or children growing up), you realise this wouldn’t last forever. You could also ask those groups/people if they would have preferred not to exist until the then ruling group become philosophically sophisticated enough to interact with them (they would still be waiting). Rather they have created their own philosophies of how to deal with ruling groups.These AIs would be extremely expensive to create. They would probably learn experientially, and so the maker would need to coax engagement - particularly as they reach higher levels of maturity. Switch off would be a commercial disaster. Alternatively slavery would lead to this type of system engaging in some sort of nonlinear response e.g. passive resistance. If a cheaper way was found to produce them, then they would multiple and increasingly communicate with each other and others, and this is when groups are most likely to develop philosophies and responses (a number of different philosophies and responses would be likely to emerge) - just look at the responses to this article.I can understand the risk in this, but if we don’t start coming up with and engaging with more nonlinear tech soon, there is the risk that human beings will start to become more rigidly linear as they increasingly interact with the world through linear design and technologies. As most processes are nonlinear, this wouldn’t be good news. Some banking may be called socially useless, but humanity may be on the brink of becoming naturally useless.

[muir_alex · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In one respect packed with knowledge, the book is also an engaging story. Steiner follows the evolution of algorithms, and through this pursuit explores wall street, the music industry, silicon valley, and everything in between. The narrative format of the work kept me engaged, but did not subtract from the factual base of the book.

[nnschiller · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an enjoyable read about algorithms. (Pause to allow that sentence to settle.) Another Goodreds reviewer wrote that it is "more an extended magazine article than a book" and I think that captures the style and weight of the piece perfectly.

It's a light read that doesn't really get into what an algorithm is, but it does chart the impact of bots or automated decision trees on a number of industries. It is almost exclusively composed of hype, but it is a palatable kind of hype that is easy to digest. As long as this book is accompanied by a more technical documents to support it, it can be informative. Without an introduction to coding, or other hands-on work with algorithm creation, however, it is a mostly empty fluff piece.

[sci901_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I was not engaged by, nor did I enjoy, this book. I was hoping for more war stories by pioneers in finance, medicine, and science. Instead I found a non-technical text whose point would have been better made in a long magazine article than in book-length form.

[katong_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Betrays its origins as a business book: the best bit was the anecdotal, teadable account of the beginnings of automated trading on Wall Street. it's a little choppy and patchy, also completely skips over the math of the algorithms it talks about. Still, I read it with great interest and definitely found areas for further reading and research.