Edward Tenner, The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do (2018)

From Arthur Molella (Smithsonian Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation): “This masterly study challenges naïve assumptions that characterize our twenty-first-century world of electronic hyperefficiency. Computers, big data, and artificial intelligence are too often allowed to supersede human judgment and indeed undermine our very self-confidence as human beings. Yet no electronic machine can match our capacity for the untidy human factors needed to balance the sanitized precision and tunnel vision of our digital devices: holistic thinking, serendipity, and intuition. Tenner urges us to forgive ourselves for being human.”