Automate This: How Algorithms Came To Rule Our World (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Short, which was good. The book is misnamed. Should be "Automate This: How Algorithms May One Day Play A More Significant Role In Your Life". Though I accept that I didn't use title case properly there and the title is likely longer than publishers wanted. Some interesting ways algorithms are being used. I was hoping for a more technical dive but that's OK. Great storytelling, made me excited to be in the field I am in. page 75 | location 1143-1145 | Added on Monday, 30 December 2013 22:12:47He blazed so many new paths in mathematics that, in an effort to avoid naming so much after one man, many theorems and equations carry the name of the first person who discovered or applied them after Euler.42page 78 | location 1183-1185 | Added on Monday, 30 December 2013 22:17:35Boolean algebra gives computer circuitry its guts. Without it, the execution of endlessly complex algorithms—the kinds that now change the world every day—would be impossible. Boole’s ideas did not setpage 80 | location 1225-1226 | Added on Monday, 30 December 2013 22:22:27Smart people assume that this creeping revolution of bot workers can’t touch them. The notion is that algorithms can’t innovate, that a bot can’t create. We’re now learning, however, that these are dangerous assumptions.page 195 | location 2985-2987 | Added on Thursday, 2 January 2014 00:36:20This was in 2007, the all-time height of the stock market. Financial-sector companies were pulling in cash like a vacuum sucks dust. To ensure their spot at the top of the heap, the finance firms needed two things: friends in Washington and the best quantitative brains money could buy. So in both cases they bought them.page 221 | location 3378-3383 | Added on Saturday, 4 January 2014 00:25:24When you ask Hammerbacher what he sees as the most promising field that could be hacked by people like himself, he responds with two words: “Medical diagnostics.” And clearly doctors should be watching their backs, but they should be extra vigilant knowing that the smartest guys of our generation—people like Hammerbacher—are gunning for them. The targets on their backs will only grow larger as their complication rates, their test results, and their practices are scrutinized by the unyielding eye of algorithms built by bright engineers. Doctors aren’t going away, but those who want to ensure their employment in the future should find ways to be exceptional. Bots can handle the grunt work, the work that falls to our average practitioners.page 222 | location 3393-3394 | Added on Saturday, 4 January 2014 00:28:07Doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, truck drivers, musicians—just how many jobs might we lose to algorithms? How much will this affect our economy?page 224 | location 3432-3436 | Added on Saturday, 4 January 2014 00:32:43So does this mean creating yet another bidder—schools—for our best quantitative minds? It does. And that’s okay—there are a lot of potentially quantitatively minded people roaming around out there who have never given their brains a proper crack at the game. Smart people aren’t in short supply. Smart people educated in quantitative fields are, however. We just need to increase the size of the funnel that gets people there. Every single student at every high school in America should be required to take at least one programming class.page 225 | location 3437-3440 | Added on Saturday, 4 January 2014 00:33:26Imagine all of the students who never give programming or quantitative fields a thought. Math, to them, is a rote skill that must be memorized so that a test or a quiz can be passed; they never see the other side of math that’s changing our world. Or when they finally do, perhaps in college, their life vector is already set toward another field.page 225 | location 3445-3447 | Added on Saturday, 4 January 2014 00:34:20Being a technical whiz isn’t about scoring well on the math and science sections of standardized tests. It’s about practice. It’s about putting in time to learn processes.
What do You think about Automate This: How Algorithms Came To Rule Our World (2012)?
Really enjoyed understanding and history of Algorithms in this book.
—Ignace
Great info, glad to be an algorithm writer. :D
—chelsasimm1998
