The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

Carr's previous book, The Shallows, challenged and subsequently shaped some of my fundamental views on the very concept of technology - led alone the Internet and it's cognitive affects on human beings. In The Glass Cage I found myself critiquing and thinking deeply about my digital world once more. Automation is a seemingly invisible beast in 2015 - ubiquitous and unnoticed. However Carr, as he does best, breaks down a multitude of seemingly obvious misconceptions about machines replacing the human work force and the ideas around humans extracting value out of simply working (and what happens to us when we're reduced to observers) to present us with a challenge: “Technology has always challenged people to think about what's important in their lives, to ask themselves...what human being means...we can allow ourselves to be carried along by the technological current, wherever it may be taking us, or we can push against it. To resist invention isn't to reject invention. It's to humble invention, to bring progress down down to earth” Once again, I find myself looking at our current world and wondering whether or not we still have dominion over our machines, our social networks - even over our digitally-induced relationships. If you find yourself in a similar situation, then this book is for you.

We reached a state of continuous technological progress for technology's sake instead of society's sake. Our tools and machines may have started out being adapted to our needs, but now it us who gets sculpted around technology. Aas machines more and more take over not only our physical but also our mental tasks, we end up de-skilled, disengaged and unhappy. The utopian vision of a work-free society falls apart with our inborn need to occupy ourselves, our bodies, our brains, with meaningful tasks.

Carr goes through different industries and demonstrates their growing dependence on computers and automation: the dangers of relying on auto-pilots (flight and cars), the trust in expert systems in medicine, reliance on GPS navigation, etc. And already the progress of automation opens up morality questions once machines will be able to drive, hurt, kill by simply following algorithms.

Obviously there is no solution in the book besides a wider uptake of the “adaptive automation” principle. Trying to position the tasks left to humanity on the upper ridge of the Yerkes–Dodson slope, bridging cognitive underload and cognitive overload. To keep us alert, to keep us occupied, to keep us happy.

The book leaves you with the message that next time you pick up a new tool or a new gadget, you should consider and evaluate what skills of yours it'll supplement and what skills it'll diminish.