Summary
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her prescient writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure has been lauded as “remarkable and persuasive” (Library Journal); “deeply compelling” (Kate Bowler); “incisive and timely-triumphant” (Dan Pink); and “both surprising and practical” (Gretchen Rubin).
Nominated for a National Book Award, Uncertain was chosen as the 2024 “Nonfiction Book of the Year” by the Independent Publishers of New England and a Top 25 Nonfiction Book of 2024 by the Next Big Idea Club led by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant and Dan Pink. Uncertain also was named a Top 10 book of the year by Greater Good magazine, the Artificiality Institute, and Library Journal, and a Top 10 Summer Read by Nautilus magazine. The book has been featured in media worldwide. Jackson’s recent lead New York Times opinion piece on uncertainty and well-being drew a quarter-million views.
Source: Website
OnAir Post: Maggie Jackson
About
Biography
Her acclaimed book Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of our tech-centric, attention-deficient modern lives. With a foreword by Bill McKibben, the book reveals the scientific discoveries that can help rekindle our powers of focus in a world of overload and fragmentation. Hailed as “influential” by the New Yorker and compared by Fast Company.com to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Distracted offers a “richly detailed and passionately argued … account of the travails facing an ADD society” (Publishers Weekly) and “concentrates the mind on a real problem of modern life” (The Wall Street Journal). The book is “now more essential than ever,” says Pulitzer finalist Nicholas Carr. Winner of the 2020 Dorothy Lee award for excellence in tech criticism, Distracted won a 2024 Independent Publishers of New England Gold Legacy Award.
Maggie Jackson’s essays, commentary, and books have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Philosopher, on National Public Radio, and in media worldwide. She wrote the foreword to Living with Robots: Emerging Issues on the Psychological and Social Implications of Robotics (Academic Press, 2019) and has contributed essays to numerous other anthologies, including State of the American Mind: Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide: Arguments For and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Penguin, 2011). Her book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, was the first to explore the fate of home in the digital age, a time when private life is permeable and portable.
Jackson is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including a 2016 Bard Graduate Center Visiting Fellowship; Media Awards from the Work-Life Council of the Conference Board, the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and the Women’s Press Club of New York. For a National Public Radio segment on the lack of labor protections offered to child newspaper carriers, she was a finalist for a Hillman Prize, one of journalism’s highest honors for social justice reporting. Jackson has served as an affiliate of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto; a Journalism Fellow in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland; and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. Her website has been named a Forbes Top 100 Site for Women three times.
Jackson is a sought-after speaker, appearing at Harvard Business School, the New York Public Library, the annual invitation-only Forbes CMO summit, the Simmons and other top women’s leadership conferences, and other corporations, libraries, hospitals, schools, religious organizations, and bookstores. A graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics with highest honors, Jackson lives with her family in New York and Rhode Island.
Source: Website
Web Links
ITDF Essay, April 2025
AIs’ Founders Are Designing AI to Make its Actions Servant to its Aims With As Little Human Interference as Possible, Undermining Human Discernment
Source: ITDF Webpage
“Human achievements depend on cognitive capabilities that are threatened by humanity’s rising dependence on technology, and more recently, AI. Studies show that active curiosity is born of a capacity to tolerate the stress of the unknown, i.e., to ask difficult, discomfiting, potentially dissenting questions. Innovations and scientific discoveries emerge from knowledge-seeking that is brimming with dead ends, detours and missteps. Complex problem-solving is little correlated with intelligence; instead, it’s the product of slow-wrought, constructed thinking.
“But today, our expanding reliance on technology and AI increasingly narrows our cognitive experience, undermining many of the skills that make us human and that help us progress. With AI set to exacerbate the negative impact of digital technologies, we should be concerned that the more we look to synthetic intelligences for answers, the more we risk diminishing our human capacities for in-depth problem-solving and cutting-edge invention.
“For example, online users already tend to take the first result offered by search engines. Now the ‘AI Overview’ is leading to declining click-through rates, indicating that people are taking even less time to evaluate online results. Grabbing the first answer online syncs with our innate heuristic, quick minds, the kind of honed knowledge that is useful in predictable environments. (When a doctor hears chest pains they automatically think ‘heart attack’).
AI-driven results may undermine our inclination to slow down, attune to a situation and discern. Classic automation bias, or deference to the machine, may burgeon as people meld mentally with AI-driven ways of knowing … If we continue adopting technologies largely unthinkingly, as we have in the past, we risk denigrating some of humanity’s most essential cognitive capacities. … I am hopeful that the makings of a seismic shift in humanity’s approach to not-knowing are emerging, offering the possibility of partnering with AI in ways that do not narrow human cognition.
“In new, unexpected situations, the speed and authoritative look of AI-driven results may undermine our inclination to slow down, attune to a situation and discern. Classic automation bias, or deference to the machine, may burgeon as people meld mentally with AI-driven ways of knowing.
“As well, working with AI may exacerbate a dangerous cognitive focus on outcome as a measure of success. Classical, rational intelligence is defined as achieving one’s goals. That makes evolutionary sense. But this vision of smarts has helped lead to a cultural fixation with ROI, quantification, ends-above-means and speed and a denigration of illuminating yet less linear ways of thinking, such as pausing or even failure.
“From the outset, AIs’ founders have adopted this rationalist definition of intelligence as their own, designing AI to make its actions servant to its aims with as little human interference as possible. This, along with creating an increasing disconnect between autonomous systems and human needs, objective-achieving machines model thinking that prioritizes snap judgment and single perspectives. In an era of rising volatility and unknowns, the value system underlying traditional AI is, in effect, outdated.
“The answer for both humans and AI is to recognize the long-overlooked value of skillful unsureness. I’m closely watching a new push by some of AI’s top minds (including Stuart Russell) to make AI unsure in its aims and so more transparent, honest and interruptible.
“As well, multi-disciplinary researchers are re-envisioning search as a process of discernment and learning, not an instant dispensing of machine-produced answers. And the new science of uncertainty is beginning to reveal how skillful unsureness bolsters learning, creativity, adaptability and curiosity.
“If we continue adopting technologies largely unthinkingly, as we have in the past, we risk denigrating some of humanity’s most essential cognitive capacities. I am hopeful that the makings of a seismic shift in humanity’s approach to not-knowing are emerging, offering the possibility of partnering with AI in ways that do not narrow human cognition.”
This essay was written in January 2025 in reply to the question: Over the next decade, what is likely to be the impact of AI advances on the experience of being human? How might the expanding interactions between humans and AI affect what many people view today as ‘core human traits and behaviors’? This and nearly 200 additional essay responses are included in the 2025 report “Being Human in 2035.”
