Even as factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers, and digitized medicine bring ease to our lives, our excessive reliance on their automated programming is leaving us disengaged and disoriented and has begun to take a serious—and sometimes catastrophic—toll on our safety and well-being.
This disturbing but compellingly argued look at the hazards of intelligent technology is the central argument of
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (U.S. edition: Norton, 288 pages; Australian edition: Bodley Head, 272 pages), a new book by Nicolas Carr, the bestselling technology writer and former
Harvard Business Review executive editor. The book came off the press in the United States recently and its Australian edition will be released this month (October 2014).
Although himself a fan of automation, Carr bewails modern society’s growing tendency to automate the wrong things, thus allowing too many systems to take total control of the most crucial parts of a task and leaving people to do little more than stare at blinking lights. “Automation weakens the bond between tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because they ask so little of us,” he says.
To attenuate our vulnerabilities to intelligent technology, Carr recommends that automated systems should require humans to participate in vital activities, such as making an aircraft autopilot periodically prompt the human pilot to manually change the plane’s course, altitude, and speed; making a medical diagnostic program run regular quizzes to teach radiologists to spot unusual cancers; and making self-driving vehicles (once they become available and practicable) require their human owners to take the wheel every now and then.
Carr warns that intrusive automation brings about the very erosion of human autonomy. “Once we start taking our moral thinking and moral decision-making away from us and putting it into the hands not of a machine really, but of the programmers of that machine, then I think we’re starting to give up something essential to what it means to be a human being,” he says.
Read Hiawatha Bray’s review of Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage in BostonGlobe.com now!Read the NPR Staff’s “Hands-Free, Mind-Free: What We Lose Through Automation,” an account of driving around with Nicholas Carr on a state-of-the-art, semi-autonomous car, in NPR.org now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Nicholas Carr is the author of
The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as
The Big Switch and
Does IT Matter? His articles and essays have appeared in
The Atlantic,
The New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal,
Wired, and
The New Republic, and he writes the widely read blog
Rough Type. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and an executive editor of the
Harvard Business Review.
OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:Reading uninterrupted. In “Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress,” an article that came out in the September 16, 2014 issue of the
Wall Street Journal, Jeanne Whalen reports on how at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading with a book or e-book can restore one’s regular reading habit that has been fractured by Google, smartphones, and social media. Whalen observes: “Some hard-core proponents say printed books are best, in part because they’re more visible around the house and serve as a reminder to read. But most slow readers say e-readers and tablets are just fine, particularly if they’re disconnected from the Internet.”
Read Jeanne Whalen’s “Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress” in the Wall Street Journal now!“Passport professor.” In “Is an Exodus of Ph.D.s Causing a Brain Drain in the U.S.?”, an article that came out in the October 1, 2014 issue of
The New Republic, journalism professor and freelance writer David R. Wheeler reports on the rise of the “passport professor,” who take their credentials across international boundaries because of the steep drop of tenure track positions in the United States from 78 percent of all university teaching jobs in 1969 to about 33 percent today. “Data is beginning to show that arts, humanities, and social science Ph.D.s are following their counterparts in science and fleeing the U.S. for better opportunities overseas,” Wheeler says. “For recently minted Ph.D.s in English and literature, the number of full-time university jobs in the U.S. has been in long-term decline for years. Opportunities abroad, however, seem to be on the upswing.”
Read David R. Wheeler’s “Is an Exodus of Ph.D.s Causing a Brain Drain in the U.S.?” in the The New Republic now! 
