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Summary
Summary
In The Glass Cage, best-selling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.
Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly people's happiness and satisfaction are tied to performing hard work in the real world, Carr reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.
From nineteenth-century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the sterile landscapes of GPS maps, The Glass Cage explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective, examining the personal as well as the economic consequences of our growing dependence on computers.
With a characteristic blend of history and philosophy, poetry and science, Carr takes us on a journey from the work and early theory of Adam Smith and Alfred North Whitehead to the latest research into human attention, memory, and happiness, culminating in a moving meditation on how we can use technology to expand the human experience.
Author Notes
Nicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Glass Cage, and Utopia is Creepy. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, and Wired. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This sweeping analysis from journalist Carr (The Shallows) outlines the various implications of automation in our everyday lives. He asks whether automating technology is always beneficial, or if we are unwittingly rendering ourselves superfluous and ineffectual, and cites examples where both might be the case, such as fatal plane crashes attributed to an overreliance on autopilot; the deskilling of architects and doctors caused by occupational software; and the adverse mental effects of GPS. When Carr broaches the dangers of technology, his otherwise nuanced insight tends towards hyperbole: "Automaticity is the inscription the world leaves on the active mind and the active self. Know-how is the evidence of the richness of that inscription." However, the more pertinent issue that he highlights is the way automation changes our world view through subtly altering our daily interactions with our surroundings. The book manages to be engaging, informative, and elicits much needed reflection on the philosophical and ethical implications of over-reliance on automation. Carr deftly incorporates hard research and historical developments with philosophy and prose to depict how technology is changing the way we live our lives and the world we find ourselves in. Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Carr's last book, the best-selling The Shallows (2010), probed the alarming downsides of widespread Internet usage. Moving along similar lines, his latest work looks at the perils of automation and argues that the added convenience provided by mechanization and computerization comes at the risk of weakening our mental and physical dexterity. Carr begins by recounting the experimental success of the computer-operated Google car, which so far has passed every city and highway driving test with flying colors. For Carr, this sci-fi dream-come-true inspires a sober discussion of the degeneration effect, whereby commercial pilots' overuse of autopilot controls has led to such a dangerous erosion of skills that airlines are now enforcing more manual flight time. Even in desk jobs, Carr points out, a growing dependence on computers amplifies the probability, as it did during the recent banking and home loan scandals, that humans will make the wrong decisions. Carr brilliantly and scrupulously explores all the psychological and economic angles of our increasingly problematic reliance on machinery and microchips to manage almost every aspect of our lives. A must-read for software engineers and technology experts in all corners of industry as well as everyone who finds himself or herself increasingly dependent on and addicted to gadgets.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN HIS PREVIOUS BOOK, "The Shallows" - essential reading about our Internet Age - Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and author of several books about technology, discussed the detrimental effects the Web has on our reading, thinking and capacity for reflection. In this new book, "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us," similarly essential if slightly repetitive, Carr explains how certain aspects of automative technology can separate us from, well, Reality. How, for all its miraculous-seeming benefits, automation also can and often does impair our mental and physical skills, cause dreadful mistakes and accidents, particularly in medicine and aviation, and threaten to turn the algorithms we create as servants into our mindless masters - what sci-fi movies have been warning us about for at least two or three decades now. (As Carr puts it near the end of "The Glass Cage," when "we become dependent on our technological slaves... we turn into slaves ourselves.") Exhibit A: Electronic medical records. In 2005, the RAND Corporation predicted that electronic medical records "could save more than $81 billion annually and improve the quality of care." But as it turns out, Carr shows us, along with the usefulness of these records has arrived a plague of problems - above all, the interposition of the computer screen between doctors and their patients. Studies have proved that checking records, possible diagnoses and drug interactions on a computer during a medical examination can interfere with what should be not only a fact-based investigation but a deeply human, partly intuitive and empathetic process. One tiny but telling detail: Handwritten records allow physicians to pick out and attend to the comments of individual colleagues. How? Penmanship. In computerized records, one font fits all. Exhibit B: The workplace. "To boost productivity, reduce labor costs and avoid human error ... you simply allocate control over as many activities as possible to software. ... People are pushed further and further out of... 'the loop.'" Exhibit C: The thoroughly fatal crash of a 2009 Continental Connection/Colgan Air flight from Newark to Buffalo, a result of what Colgan itself called the pilots' lack of "situational awareness." After the autopilot automatically disconnected during the landing approach - as it was programmed to do - owing to a stall warning, the captain tried to climb. He should have descended, in order to gain speed and subsequent lift. Carr plausibly makes the case that in general, pilots' increasing reliance on automated flying reduces their own ability to actually fly a plane in any direct way. Flying, over all, is safer than ever, Carr admits, but pilots' growing dependence on automated systems - their increasing separation from and lack of experience with hands-on flight controls - poses a new and modern kind of danger. "A heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots' expertise ... leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain's University of Bristol, calls 'a deskilling of the crew.'" (Contrast that with Chesley Sullenberger's highly skilled, manual safe ditching of his US Airways Airbus A320 a few weeks earlier in the Hudson River after a flock of geese disabled its engines.) And so on. With every new example of the deskilling, dehumanizing and sometimes life-threatening perils of automation, Carr takes care to acknowledge its benefits. This is not a jeremiad. But it does make a case. In the very early pages of "The Glass Cage," Carr himself falls victim to a kind of literary automaticity, using such colloquially prefab wordings as "no big deal," "thorny questions," "sure bet," "how we pull off such a feat," "snagging a fly ball." (Anyway, I think you shag fly balls - during practice, at least. Snagging is mainly for line drives.) And there's elegant variation here and there: "lauded" for "praised," "spurred" for "caused," etc. Other problems: the repetition of some central ideas, such as the aforementioned, almost ritualized bows to the blessings of automation and the way automation frequently begins to dictate human actions and thought processes rather than the other way around. And there is what I thought might be an unnecessary over-abundance of quoted sources - 375 or so footnotes for 232 pages of text. But that apparatus also demonstrates the wide research that underlies Carr's facts, fears and philosophy. And the book picks up speed and eloquence as it goes along. You begin to find more strong, short sentences - sentences that make you stop and think (which is basically all Carr is asking us to do). "We've designed a system that discards us." Digital technologies are "designed to be disinviting. They pull us away from the world." "The real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better ... than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naïve and pliable." "The mind's eye can't see straight." "To really understand anything, including yourself ... requires as much mistrust as trust." This last quotation comes from the book's final - and most impressive - chapter, "The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows," in which Carr presents his convictions about the ideal relationship between our tools and ourselves. He does so mainly by means of a pretty brilliant - and, in this context, pretty unexpected - exegesis of Robert Frost's sonnet "Mowing." It wouldn't do the chapter justice to digest it here. Read it yourself. Read the whole book, if you want to understand the dangers that many forms of automative intermediation pose to what Carr (and I, and I bet you) think is the best way of living in the world. But here's a sample: "Labor, whether of the body or the mind, is more than a way of getting things done. It's a form of contemplation, a way of seeing the world face-to-face rather than through a glass It binds us to the earth ... as love binds us to one another. The antithesis of transcendence, work puts us in our place." DANIEL MENAKER, formerly executive editor in chief of Random House, is the author of six books, most recently "My Mistake: A Memoir."
Choice Review
In this philosophical treatise on man and machine, noted technology writer Carr, author of The Shallows (CH, Nov'10, 48-1521), investigates the effects of technology on the human condition. While conceding to the undeniable benefits of automation in helping people to live longer, healthier, cleaner, and safer lives, Carr warns that humanity also pays a price for such luxury and efficiency. Hidden within our inheritance of ever-advancing technological change are latent and unintentional consequences that damage our perceptions and limit our choices. He posits that these consequences are so great that they counteract the good that technology offers. In attempting to prove his theory, he reviews and reinterprets a broad and diverse spectrum of moments in technological history. The author also draws on a wide range of Western thinkers, including Karl Marx, René Descartes, Plato, Adam Smith, George Dyson, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Frost, to assist him in presenting his view that technology should be adapted to the human condition and not, as he asserts is happening everywhere, the other way around. Those familiar with the historians, writers, technologists, and economists mentioned will gain additional insight through Carr's penetrating analysis of human experiences like flow, proprioception, focus, and complacency. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Susan M. Frey, Indiana State University
Kirkus Review
Serious technophobic exploration of the dangers of machines superseding the role of humans in the workforce.Technology journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 2010, etc.), the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, is on a selfless mission to warn humanity about the dangers of robots and computers making human beings obsolete in the world of work. Although the book is certainly more than a Luddite tirade about the increasing subservience of humans to the machines they manufacture, the authors arguments can sometimesventure into paranoiac territory, seemingly more for shock value than anything else. But his core argumentthat mans own mental faculties, natural instincts and vital creativity are being dulled by dependence on machinesis well-argued, and he cites more than a few compelling instances in which this technological dependency has proved fatale.g., pilots overly accustomed to flying on computerized autopilot who, when forced to act manually, freeze up and make costly mistakes in otherwise routine situations. Carr also takes a critical look at the potential problems and contradictions inherent in new technology, such as Google Glass, designed to allow tech geeks to stay connected with cyberspace without becoming alienated from their surroundings while constantly checking text messages and such. The author proposes that human beings must take a more dominant and less dependent role in how computer technology is being implemented in society and not be mindlessly carried along by a blind faith in technological advancementa task probably much easier said than done.An important if occasionally overbearing study of how machines are making us less human and what we can do about it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Alert for Operators | p. 1 |
| Chapter 1 Passengers | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 The Robot at the Gate | p. 19 |
| Chapter 3 On Autopilot | p. 43 |
| Chapter 4 The Degeneration Effect | p. 65 |
| Interlude, with Dancing Mice | p. 87 |
| Chapter 5 White-Collar Computer | p. 93 |
| Chapter 6 World and Screen | p. 125 |
| Chapter 7 Automation for the People | p. 153 |
| Interlude, with Grave Robber | p. 177 |
| Chapter 8 Your Inner Drone | p. 183 |
| Chapter 9 The Love That Lays the Swale in Rows | p. 211 |
| Notes | p. 233 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 263 |
| Index | p. 265 |
