It’s her skewering of the meritocracy – based on the notion that the best naturally rise to the top, gender notwithstanding – that makes Uncanny Valley an important and auspicious debut. Orderly and a math whiz herself, Wiener exists well enough among such entrepreneurs yet is troubled by empty talk of promoting a more diverse workforce followed by the hiring of almost no women. Relatability to “ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs” runs in diametric opposition to mounting VC-backed pressure that invariably accompanies growth. We’re taken inside two Silicon Valley firms where the author made a sharp left turn career change and there’s no shortage of animatronics on full display. That Anna Wiener borrowed it to title her memoir demonstrates the intersection of intelligence and wit found across its 275 pages. The term “uncanny valley” was coined in the 1970s at the Tokyo Institute of Technology to capture the revulsion stirred in observers when robots start looking a bit too human (picture the range from cute to relatable to freakish).
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