Autopilot: The Art & Science of Doing Nothing

Show me on this brain where Six Sigma hurt you.

Autopilot is a pop-science/manifesto, where Andrew Smart, a machine learning engineer with a background in neuroscience, argues that busyness is a curse, and that idleness is actually a necessary and useful part of being human. The book has a kind of freshman earnest intensity that overwhelms the argument. I’ll buy that there is a resting network in the brain, that activates when we aren’t thinking about or doing anything in particular, but I’m not sure that the converse, that activating this network leads to genius, is true. Certainly there’s a way in which the managerial jargon of efficiency and always being on task is actually opposed to risk-taking and innovation, but while Smart is persuasive in criticizing Six Sigma in particular, his arguments drawing on Rilke are much less convincing, and the neuroscience comes in a gush of metaphors.