The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by
Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022
No takers. And so the voice returned, this time announcing that four names would be selected, and those people would have to leave. A moment later, flight attendants approached a young couple who dutifully rose from their seats and trudged forward off the plane. But when the attendants approached Dr. David Dao, he didn’t rise. Approached by a United supervisor, Daniele Hill, Dao identified himself as a physician on his way home, and he pointed out that missing tonight’s flight would mean missing his rounds in the morning. He had patients depending on him to be there. He could not get off this plane. Tensions rose.
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Our rational mind hands over the steering wheel: “System 2 acquiesces to a powerful intuition. Thus, in addition to being lazy and inattentive, System 2 is sometimes a bit of a pushover.”3 When an outside system is entirely opaque, and also plays into our magical thinking, as demonstrated by the passengers and crew and airport police on the United flight, everyone except David Dao, we do indeed get pushed over. Even in the face of patients needing a doctor or a man violently dragged down an airplane aisle, we find a way to trust the logical-looking system. WE’VE BEEN PUTTING enormous, irrational trust in machines for nearly as long as we’ve been communicating with them. In 1964, not even a decade after McCarthy and his group gathered to theorize about thinking machines, a man built a simple conversational program that elicited powerful confessions from strangers.
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And everything in that system is designed to heighten our trust: the scripted language of the flight attendants and the captain over the intercom, the uniforms, the regimented timetables. It’s extremely rare for the choreography to be interrupted the way Dao’s journey was. Think of what Weizenbaum might have said had he been seated on David Dao’s flight. As the voice asks for volunteers, he might have leaned over to the person next to him and pointed out that the passengers are primed to believe that things will go as they always have. They’re not ready for a departure from the typical experience. And they’re not ready to think critically about the system and how it works.
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by
Reid Hoffman
and
Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018
Culture is critical because it influences how people act in the absence of specific directives and rules, or when those rules reach their breaking point. In a notorious example from 2017, acting at the request of United Airlines, Chicago Department of Aviation employees forcibly dragged passenger David Dao off an overbooked flight, breaking his nose, knocking out two of his teeth, and giving him a significant concussion in the process. The next morning, United CEO Oscar Munoz sent a rather perplexing e-mail to United Airlines employees. Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this.
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I do, however, believe there are lessons we can learn from this experience, and we are taking a close look at the circumstances surrounding this incident. Treating our customers and each other with respect and dignity is at the core of who we are, and we must always remember this no matter how challenging the situation. The David Dao incident is a classic example of how a poor articulation of company values can weaken the culture. The employees on the ground believed they needed to bump passengers from the flight so that United could get another flight crew to their plane (i.e., “flying right”) and that meeting metrics such as on-time departures and flight cancellations was more important than treating customers with “respect and dignity” (which most of us would agree does not include breaking their noses and knocking out their teeth).
The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by
Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018
Classification: LCC HD2757.2 (ebook) | LCC HD2757.2 .T46 2018 (print) | DDC 330.973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038947 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: ©iStock.com/simon2579 Introduction On April 9, 2017, police officers from Chicago's O'Hare Airport removed Dr. David Dao from United Express Flight 3411. The flight was overbooked, but he refused to give up his seat. He had patients to treat the next day. Fellow passengers recorded a video of him being dragged off the plane. You could hear gasps of disbelief from fellow passengers: “Oh, my god!” “No! This is wrong.”
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by
Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019
No one took the offer. They upped the compensation to $800 plus the hotel room, but again, there were no takers. Meanwhile, priority passengers had already started boarding, including those who had reserved seats in first class. An algorithm and an automated system chose four people to bump, including Dr. David Dao and his wife, who is also a physician. He called the airline from his seat, explaining that he had patients to see the following day. While the other passengers complied, Dao refused to leave. Chicago Department of Aviation officials threatened Dao with jail time if he didn’t move. You are undoubtedly familiar with what happened next, because video of the incident went viral on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and was then rebroadcast for days on news networks around the world.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by
Isabel Wilkerson
Published 14 Sep 2020
The airline had discovered that it had overbooked the flight, and no passenger took the airline up on offers of compensation in exchange for giving up their seats. The airline chose four passengers, at random by computer, to be ejected. The first three passengers left the plane without incident, but the Vietnamese-American man, a physician named David Dao, said he had an urgent need to get back to his patients. He said he had paid his fare and should not have to give up his seat. The airline called security to remove him, and he was dragged by his legs in front of stunned passengers. Captured on a video that quickly went viral, the incident drew outrage across the country and in Asia.