Just Finished Reading: The Glass Cage – How Our Computers are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr (FP: 2014)

Automation has been a great boon to the world – most especially the developed West – with decades long increases in productivity, wealth and much else besides. Advanced countries could not be where they are without it but what else has happened as robots take over factories, artisans become machine minders and more of what we used to do ourselves is done by the machines we are developing?

This is the question that the author tries to answer in this interesting book. Beyond the intentions of engineers, managers, IT gurus and politicians are the unintended and, sometimes at least, dangerous consequences of all of the advances we live with each day. With the very best of intentions (plus to both make and save money – naturally) increasing automation was supposed to lead to more leisure and, hopefully, to more fulfilled lives for all concerned. It’s a laudable aim. After all who wants to be forced to undertake dirty and dangerous jobs when machines can do them more safely and more efficiently? It’s pretty much a no-brainer, right? Of course it is. So we automate. We reduce danger, we reduce effort, we reduce stress, we reduce training, we reduce the need for intelligence, we reduce a job to pushing the occasional button and, if things go wrong, jumping in and fixing things – unless all of that watching and waiting hasn’t put the operator into a coma. This is, the author maintains with evidence to support him, what happens when humans are put in to a supervisory role with machines. Humans are not built to concentrate on things for extended periods of time. We are not ‘wired’ to be able to respond instantly and accurately after hours (or days) staring at a screen before something goes wrong. It takes time to ‘wake up’ and realise there’s a problem, it takes time to find out what the problem is and figure out a way to resolve it – most especially if it’s been weeks (or longer) since you last actually operated the machinery. When that machinery is a passenger jet and you have less than 2 minutes to save everyone on board that could be, and has been judged to be, a very real problem.

But the malaise, the author contends, is not just with airline pilots and machine operators – it’s with me and you too. How do you get around these days? Do you have a GPS device sitting on your dash or plugged into your ear when you walk around even a familiar place? Do you take any notice of physical landmarks or do you listen to the seat voice saying ‘turn left in 200 yards’ and then you do so without thinking or, possibly, looking what’s ahead of you. Why do we hear regular stories of truck drivers stuck under low bridges or bus drivers decapitating their vehicle likewise? I’ve seen my friends use GPS to get home from their local cinema – a journey that they’ve done HUNDREDS of times. Our apparent reluctance to actually navigate ourselves around – whilst potentially annoying (and sometimes dangerous) is only a symptom though – of our increasing outsourcing of knowledge and expertise to machines and software apps. We are increasingly refusing to learn difficult skills or knowledge knowing that there’s an app for that. It’s why many people walk around gripping their phones as if they are more than symbolic life preservers. It’s because far too many of us no longer know where we are and no longer have the skills (or the will) to find out. With the world becoming more complicated by the day and, coincidentally, we adopt more technological aids to get us through the day, we are increasingly in danger of making ourselves incapable of solving or even responding to the problems coming our way. Technological fixes, especially when they seem to solve our problems efficiently and cheaply, should be treated with caution and this book importantly underlines that fact. Recommended for anyone concerned about the future and the technology in their hands today. Much more technology to come….