Wiser Than Our Machines

About the book

Synopsis

Wiser Than Our Machines: Wisdom, Dignity, and the Algorithmic Age began with a small, almost domestic observation: that the order in which a physician read his patients’ images had quietly passed into the keeping of software he had never seen. Nothing was wrong — the software was good, the patients better served — but a judgment exercised for decades had been delegated, gradually and reasonably, until one day it was gone. And once the author saw that shape in his reading room, he began to see it everywhere: in the news our neighbors receive, the prices they are quoted, the loans and jobs they are granted or refused, the benefits their government computes.

Written by a builder of predictive instruments who is also a professional skeptic of their claims — and a Christian persuaded that the human being, not processing power, is the fixed point from which every technology must be measured — the book stands in three parts: what an algorithm actually is; ten domains of modern life examined one by one, as a physician makes rounds; and a response, from the discipline of attention to a charter for the algorithmic age. It closes with ten things a machine cannot become.