What is it about?

This review discusses Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen’s book Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures. The book explores how artificial intelligence (AI), biometric systems, chatbots, and other “augmentation technologies” are changing the ways people work, communicate, learn, and make decisions. Rather than treating these technologies as neutral tools, the authors argue that they shape human behavior, social values, and institutional power in important ways.

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Why is it important?

The review foregrounds the growing importance of AI literacy, transparency, accountability, and ethical documentation at a time when automated systems increasingly shape workplaces, education, healthcare, surveillance, and everyday communication. It encourages readers to move beyond purely technical understandings of AI to critically examine the social, rhetorical, and political consequences of automation and augmentation systems. In doing so, it repositions technical communicators not merely as producers or translators of information, but as ethical mediators who shape how AI systems are explained, interpreted, documented, governed, and integrated into organizational and public life.

Perspectives

As someone interested in institutional communication, power, justice, and accountability, I was particularly drawn to the book’s discussions of surveillance, AI governance, and communicative agency. The book challenged me to think more critically about how technologies that promise efficiency may also normalize monitoring, exclusion, and unequal participation, while also providing concrete frameworks for critically evaluating AI systems and their ethical implications.

Cornelius Fuumaale Suom-Kogle
Michigan Technological University

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This page is a summary of: Review of "Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures by Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen," Duin, A. H., & Pedersen, I. (2023). Augmentation technologies and a..., Communication Design Quarterly, March 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3794916.3794921.
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