Because while many of them claim that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be great for humankind, they rarely note that, for many people, the first three weren’t all that great.

games). I am much more worried, though—maybe an 8 or a 9—about the humans who are designing and implementing all of this new technology.

It’s more like “suboptimism”—a word I made up to convey my belief that while our worst fears about AI and automation may not play out, there are real, urgent threats that require our attention.

The same principle will apply, the optimists argue, to professionals in all kinds of fields. Doctors will consult with machine learning models before diagnosing diseases, judges will use recidivism algorithms to inform their sentencing decisions, and journalists will apply human touches to machine-generated first drafts. In all of those instances,