Automation
An annotated collection of 5 books & papers on automation, spanning 1950 to 2022. Featuring works by Norbert Wiener, Jacques Ellul, Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Human Use of Human Beings
Cybernetics as a philosophy of society, not just engineering. Wiener saw that feedback loops govern organisations, economies, and minds decades before anyone used the word "systems thinking." This is the most readable en…
The Technological Society
Ellul's central claim is that technique — the ensemble of means oriented toward efficiency — has become an autonomous system that shapes human ends rather than serving them. The argument is extreme and deliberately uncom…
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
The first machine age augmented physical force; the second augments cognitive capacity. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that we are at an inflection point where digital technologies begin doing for mental work what the ste…
The Race Between Machine and Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment
A rigorous theoretical framework on the competition between automation (which displaces labour) and the creation of new tasks (which generates employment). Acemoglu and Restrepo offer the analytical counterweight to Bryn…
The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence
Brynjolfsson draws a clean distinction between AI that substitutes (automation) and AI that augments (augmentation). When AI imitates the human and replaces them, workers lose bargaining power and value concentrates. Whe…