The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr

  THAT DOESN’T mean that computers now have tacit knowledge, or that they’ve started to think the way we think, or that they’ll soon be able to do everything people can do. They don’t, they haven’t, and they won’t. Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence. People are mindful; computers are mindless. But when it comes to performing demanding tasks, whether with the brain or the body, computers are able to replicate our ends without replicating our means. When a driverless car makes a left turn in traffic, it’s not tapping into a well of intuition and skill; it’s following a program. But while the strategies are different, the outcomes, for practical purposes, are the same. The superhuman speed with which computers can follow instructions, calculate probabilities, and receive and send data means that they can use explicit knowledge to perform many of the complicated tasks that we do with tacit knowledge. In some cases, the unique strengths of computers allow them to perform what we consider to be tacit skills better than we can perform them ourselves. In a world of computer-controlled cars, you wouldn’t need traffic lights or stop signs. Through the continuous, high-speed exchange of data, vehicles would seamlessly coordinate their passage through even the busiest of intersections—just as computers today regulate the flow of inconceivable numbers of data packets along the highways and byways of the internet. What’s ineffable in our own minds becomes altogether effable in the circuits of a microchip.

  Many of the cognitive talents we’ve considered uniquely human, it turns out, are anything but. Once computers get quick enough, they can begin to mimic our ability to spot patterns, make judgments, and learn from experience. We were first taught that lesson back in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer, which could evaluate a billion possible moves every five seconds, beat the world champion Garry Kasparov. With Google’s intelligent car, which can process a million environmental readings a second, we’re learning the lesson again. A lot of the very smart things that people do don’t actually require a brain. The intellectual talents of highly trained professionals are no more protected from automation than is the driver’s left turn. We see the evidence everywhere. Creative and analytical work of all sorts is being mediated by software. Doctors use computers to diagnose diseases. Architects use them to design buildings. Attorneys use them to evaluate evidence. Musicians use them to simulate instruments and correct bum notes. Teachers use them to tutor students and grade papers. Computers aren’t taking over these professions entirely, but they are taking over many aspects of them. And they’re certainly changing the way the work is performed.

  It’s not only vocations that are being computerized. Avocations are too. Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other small, affordable, and even wearable computers, we now depend on software to carry out many of our daily chores and pastimes. We launch apps to aid us in shopping, cooking, exercising, even finding a mate and raising a child. We follow turn-by-turn GPS instructions to get from one place to the next. We use social networks to maintain friendships and express our feelings. We seek advice from recommendation engines on what to watch, read, and listen to. We look to Google, or to Apple’s Siri, to answer our questions and solve our problems. The computer is becoming our all-purpose tool for navigating, manipulating, and understanding the world, in both its physical and its social manifestations. Just think what happens these days when people misplace their smartphones or lose their connections to the net. Without their digital assistants, they feel helpless. As Katherine Hayles, a literature professor at Duke University, observed in her 2012 book How We Think, “When my computer goes down or my Internet connection fails, I feel lost, disoriented, unable to work—in fact, I feel as if my hands have been amputated.” 6

  Our dependency on computers may be disconcerting at times, but in general we welcome it. We’re eager to celebrate and show off our whizzy new gadgets and apps—and not only because they’re so useful and so stylish. There’s something magical about computer automation. To watch an iPhone identify an obscure song playing over the sound system in a bar is to experience something that would have been inconceivable to any previous generation. To see a crew of brightly painted factory robots effortlessly assemble a solar panel or a jet engine is to view an exquisite heavy-metal ballet, each movement choreographed to a fraction of a millimeter and a sliver of a second. The people who have taken rides in Google’s car report that the thrill is almost otherworldly; their earth-bound brain has a tough time processing the experience. Today, we really do seem to be entering a brave new world, a Tomorrowland where computers and automatons will be at our service, relieving us of our burdens, granting our wishes, and sometimes just keeping us company. Very soon now, our Silicon Valley wizards assure us, we’ll have robot maids as well as robot chauffeurs. Sundries will be fabricated by 3-D printers and delivered to our doors by drones. The world of the Jetsons, or at least of Knight Rider, beckons.

  It’s hard not to feel awestruck. It’s also hard not to feel apprehensive. An automatic transmission may seem a paltry thing beside Google’s tricked-out, look-ma-no-humans Prius, but the former was a precursor to the latter, a small step along the path to total automation, and I can’t help but remember the letdown I felt after the gear stick was taken from my hand—or, to put responsibility where it belongs, after I begged to have the gear stick taken from my hand. If the convenience of an automatic transmission left me feeling a little lacking, a little underutilized, as a labor economist might say, how will it feel to become, truly, a passenger in my own car?

  THE TROUBLE with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do. To understand why that’s so, and why we’re eager to accept the bargain, we need to take a look at how certain cognitive biases—flaws in the way we think—can distort our perceptions. When it comes to assessing the value of labor and leisure, the mind’s eye can’t see straight.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor and author of the popular 1990 book Flow, has described a phenomenon that he calls “the paradox of work.” He first observed it in a study he conducted in the 1980s with his University of Chicago colleague Judith LeFevre. They recruited a hundred workers, blue-collar and white-collar, skilled and unskilled, from five businesses around Chicago. They gave each an electronic pager (this was when cell phones were still luxury goods) that they had programmed to beep at seven random moments a day over the course of a week. At each beep, the subjects would fill out a short questionnaire. They’d describe the activity they were engaged in at that moment, the challenges they were facing, the skills they were deploying, and the psychological state they were in, as indicated by their sense of motivation, satisfaction, engagement, creativity, and so forth. The intent of this “experience sampling,” as Csikszentmihalyi termed the technique, was to see how people spend their time, on the job and off, and how their activities influence their “quality of experience.”

  The results were surprising. People were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were doing, while they were at work than during their leisure hours. In their free time, they tended to feel bored and anxious. And yet they didn’t like to be at work. When they were on the job, they expressed a strong desire to be off the job, and when they were off the job, the last thing they wanted was to go back to work. “We have,” reported Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, “the paradoxical situation of people having many more positive feelings at work than in leisure, yet saying that they ‘wish to be doing something else’ when they are at work, not when they are in leisure.”7 We’re terrible, the experiment revealed, at anticipating which activities will satisfy us and which will leave us discontented. Even when we’re in the midst of doing something, we don’t seem able to judge its psychic consequences accurately.

  Those are symptoms of a more general affliction, on which psychologists have bestowed the poetic name miswanting. We’re inclined to desire things we don’t like and to like things we don’t desire. “When the things we want to happen do not improve our happiness, and wh
en the things we want not to happen do,” the cognitive psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson have observed, “it seems fair to say we have wanted badly.”8 And as slews of gloomy studies show, we’re forever wanting badly. There’s also a social angle to our tendency to misjudge work and leisure. As Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre discovered in their experiments, and as most of us know from our own experience, people allow themselves to be guided by social conventions—in this case, the deep-seated idea that being “at leisure” is more desirable, and carries more status, than being “at work”—rather than by their true feelings. “Needless to say,” the researchers concluded, “such a blindness to the real state of affairs is likely to have unfortunate consequences for both individual well-being and the health of society.” As people act on their skewed perceptions, they will “try to do more of those activities that provide the least positive experiences and avoid the activities that are the source of their most positive and intense feelings.”9 That’s hardly a recipe for the good life.

  It’s not that the work we do for pay is intrinsically superior to the activities we engage in for diversion or entertainment. Far from it. Plenty of jobs are dull and even demeaning, and plenty of hobbies and pastimes are stimulating and fulfilling. But a job imposes a structure on our time that we lose when we’re left to our own devices. At work, we’re pushed to engage in the kinds of activities that human beings find most satisfying. We’re happiest when we’re absorbed in a difficult task, a task that has clear goals and that challenges us not only to exercise our talents but to stretch them. We become so immersed in the flow of our work, to use Csikszentmihalyi’s term, that we tune out distractions and transcend the anxieties and worries that plague our everyday lives. Our usually wayward attention becomes fixed on what we’re doing. “Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one,” explains Csikszentmihalyi. “Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”10 Such states of deep absorption can be produced by all manner of effort, from laying tile to singing in a choir to racing a dirt bike. You don’t have to be earning a wage to enjoy the transports of flow.

  More often than not, though, our discipline flags and our mind wanders when we’re not on the job. We may yearn for the workday to be over so we can start spending our pay and having some fun, but most of us fritter away our leisure hours. We shun hard work and only rarely engage in challenging hobbies. Instead, we watch TV or go to the mall or log on to Facebook. We get lazy. And then we get bored and fretful. Disengaged from any outward focus, our attention turns inward, and we end up locked in what Emerson called the jail of self-consciousness. Jobs, even crummy ones, are “actually easier to enjoy than free time,” says Csikszentmihalyi, because they have the “built-in” goals and challenges that “encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.”11 But that’s not what our deceiving minds want us to believe. Given the opportunity, we’ll eagerly relieve ourselves of the rigors of labor. We’ll sentence ourselves to idleness.

  IS IT any wonder we’re enamored of automation? By offering to reduce the amount of work we have to do, by promising to imbue our lives with greater ease, comfort, and convenience, computers and other labor-saving technologies appeal to our eager but misguided desire for release from what we perceive as toil. In the workplace, automation’s focus on enhancing speed and efficiency—a focus determined by the profit motive rather than by any particular concern for people’s well-being—often has the effect of removing complexity from jobs, diminishing the challenge they present and hence the engagement they promote. Automation can narrow people’s responsibilities to the point that their jobs consist largely of monitoring a computer screen or entering data into prescribed fields. Even highly trained analysts and other so-called knowledge workers are seeing their work circumscribed by decision-support systems that turn the making of judgments into a data-processing routine. The apps and other programs we use in our private lives have similar effects. By taking over difficult or time-consuming tasks, or simply rendering those tasks less onerous, the software makes it even less likely that we’ll engage in efforts that test our skills and give us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. All too often, automation frees us from that which makes us feel free.

  The point is not that automation is bad. Automation and its precursor, mechanization, have been marching forward for centuries, and by and large our circumstances have improved greatly as a result. Deployed wisely, automation can relieve of us drudge work and spur us on to more challenging and fulfilling endeavors. The point is that we’re not very good at thinking rationally about automation or understanding its implications. We don’t know when to say “enough” or even “hold on a second.” The deck is stacked, economically and emotionally, in automation’s favor. The benefits of transferring work from people to machines and computers are easy to identify and measure. Businesses can run the numbers on capital investments and calculate automation’s benefits in hard currency: reduced labor costs, improved productivity, faster throughputs and turnarounds, higher profits. In our personal lives, we can point to all sorts of ways that computers allow us to save time and avoid hassles. And thanks to our bias for leisure over work, ease over effort, we overestimate automation’s benefits.

  The costs are harder to pin down. We know computers make certain jobs obsolete and put some people out of work, but history suggests, and most economists assume, that any declines in employment will prove temporary and that over the long haul productivity-boosting technology will create attractive new occupations and raise standards of living. The personal costs are even hazier. How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill? You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone, and even then we may have trouble expressing the losses in concrete terms. But the costs are real. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to computers and which we keep for ourselves are not just practical or economic choices. They’re ethical choices. They shape the substance of our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world. Automation confronts us with the most important question of all: What does human being mean?

  Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre discovered something else in their study of people’s daily routines. Among all the leisure activities reported by their test subjects, the one that generated the greatest sense of flow was driving a car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ROBOT AT THE GATE

  IN THE EARLY 1950S, Leslie Illingworth, a much-admired political cartoonist at the British satirical magazine Punch, drew a dark and foreboding sketch. Set at dusk on what appears to be a stormy autumn day, it shows a worker peering anxiously from the doorway of an anonymous manufacturing plant. One of his hands grips a small tool; the other is balled into a fist. He looks out across the muddy factory yard to the plant’s main gate. There, standing beside a sign reading “Hands Wanted,” looms a giant, broad-shouldered robot. Across its chest, emblazoned in block letters, is the word “Automation.”

  The illustration was a sign of its times, a reflection of a new anxiety seeping through Western society. In 1956, it was reprinted as the frontispiece of a slender but influential book called Automation: Friend or Foe? by Robert Hugh Macmillan, an engineering professor at Cambridge University. On the first page, Macmillan posed an unsettling question: “Are we in danger of being destroyed by our own creations?” He was not, he explained, referring to the well-known “perils of unrestricted ‘push-button’ warfare.” He was talking about a less discussed but more insidious threat: “the rapidly increasing part that automatic devices are playing in the peace-time industrial life of all civilized countries.”1 Just as earlier machines “had replaced man’s muscles,” these new devices seemed likely to “replace his brains.” By taking over many good, well-paying jobs, they threatened to create widespread unemployme
nt, leading to social strife and upheaval—of just the sort Karl Marx had foreseen a century earlier.2

  But, Macmillan continued, it didn’t have to be that way. If “rightly applied,” automation could bring economic stability, spread prosperity, and relieve the human race of its toils. “My hope is that this new branch of technology may eventually enable us to lift the curse of Adam from the shoulders of man, for machines could indeed become men’s slaves rather than their masters, now that practical techniques have been devised for controlling them automatically.”3 Whether technologies of automation ultimately proved boon or bane, Macmillan warned, one thing was certain: they would play an ever greater role in industry and society. The economic imperatives of “a highly competitive world” made that inevitable.4 If a robot could work faster, cheaper, or better than its human counterpart, the robot would get the job.

  “WE ARE brothers and sisters of our machines,” the technology historian George Dyson once remarked.5 Sibling relations are notoriously fraught, and so it is with our technological kin. We love our machines—not just because they’re useful to us, but because we find them companionable and even beautiful. In a well-built machine, we see some of our deepest aspirations take form: the desire to understand the world and its workings, the desire to turn nature’s power to our own purposes, the desire to add something new and of our own fashioning to the cosmos, the desire to be awed and amazed. An ingenious machine is a source of wonder and of pride.