The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr

  Gary Klein, a research psychologist who studies how people make decisions, has deeper worries. By forcing physicians to follow set rules, evidence-based medicine “can impede scientific progress,” he writes. Should hospitals and insurers “mandate EBM, backed up by the threat of lawsuits if adverse outcomes are accompanied by any departure from best practices, physicians will become reluctant to try alternative treatment strategies that have not yet been evaluated using randomized controlled trials. Scientific advancement can become stifled if front-line physicians, who blend medical expertise with respect for research, are prevented from exploration and are discouraged from making discoveries.”53

  If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two?

  In his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott provided a vivid description of the modern rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.” The rationalist has no concern for culture or history; he neither cultivates nor displays a personal perspective. His thinking is notable only for “the rapidity with which he reduces the tangle and variety of experience” into “a formula.”54 Oakeshott’s words also provide us with a perfect description of computer intelligence: eminently practical and productive and entirely lacking in curiosity, imagination, and worldliness.

  * The use of terms like neural network and neuromorphic processing may give the impression that computers operate the way brains operate (or vice versa). But the terms shouldn’t be taken literally; they’re figures of speech. Since we don’t yet know how brains operate, how thought and consciousness arise from the interplay of neurons, we can’t build computers that work as brains do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WORLD AND SCREEN

  THE SMALL ISLAND OF IGLOOLIK, lying off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of the Canadian North, is a bewildering place in the winter. The average temperature hovers around twenty degrees below zero. Thick sheets of sea ice cover the surrounding waters. The sun is absent. Despite the brutal conditions, Inuit hunters have for some four thousand years ventured out from their homes on the island and traversed miles of ice and tundra in search of caribou and other game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed voyagers and scientists ever since 1822, when the English explorer William Edward Parry noted in his journal the “astonishing precision” of his Inuit guide’s geographic knowledge.1 The Inuit’s extraordinary wayfinding skills are born not of technological prowess—they’ve eschewed maps, compasses, and other instruments—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, tides, and currents. The Inuit are masters of perception.

  Or at least they used to be. Something changed in Inuit culture at the turn of the millennium. In the year 2000, the U.S. government lifted many of the restrictions on the civilian use of the global positioning system. The accuracy of GPS devices improved even as their prices dropped. The Igloolik hunters, who had already swapped their dogsleds for snowmobiles, began to rely on computer-generated maps and directions to get around. Younger Inuit were particularly eager to use the new technology. In the past, a young hunter had to endure a long and arduous apprenticeship with his elders, developing his wayfinding talents over many years. By purchasing a cheap GPS receiver, he could skip the training and offload responsibility for navigation to the device. And he could travel out in some conditions, such as dense fog, that used to make hunting trips impossible. The ease, convenience, and precision of automated navigation made the Inuit’s traditional techniques seem antiquated and cumbersome by comparison.

  But as GPS devices proliferated on Igloolik, reports began to spread of serious accidents during hunts, some resulting in injuries and even deaths. The cause was often traced to an overreliance on satellites. When a receiver breaks or its batteries freeze, a hunter who hasn’t developed strong wayfinding skills can easily become lost in the featureless waste and fall victim to exposure. Even when the devices operate properly, they present hazards. The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can give hunters a form of tunnel vision. Trusting the GPS instructions, they’ll speed onto dangerously thin ice, over cliffs, or into other environmental perils that a skilled navigator would have had the sense and foresight to avoid. Some of these problems may eventually be mitigated by improvements in navigational devices or by better instruction in their use. What won’t be mitigated is the loss of what one tribal elder describes as “the wisdom and knowledge of the Inuit.”2

  The anthropologist Claudio Aporta, of Carleton University in Ottawa, has been studying Inuit hunters for years. He reports that while satellite navigation offers attractive advantages, its adoption has already brought a deterioration in wayfinding abilities and, more generally, a weakened feel for the land. As a hunter on a GPS-equipped snowmobile devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it.3 A singular talent that has defined and distinguished a people for thousands of years may well evaporate over the course of a generation or two.

  THE WORLD is a strange, changeable, and dangerous place. Getting around in it demands of any animal a great deal of effort, mental and physical. For ages, human beings have been creating tools to reduce the strain of travel. History is, among other things, a record of the discovery of ingenious new ways to ease our passage through our environs, to make it possible to cross greater and more daunting distances without getting lost, roughed up, or eaten. Simple maps and trail markers came first, then star maps and nautical charts and terrestrial globes, then instruments like sounding weights, quadrants, astrolabes, compasses, octants and sextants, telescopes, hourglasses, and chronometers. Lighthouses were erected along shorelines, buoys set in coastal waters. Roads were paved, signs posted, highways linked and numbered. It has, for most of us, been a long time since we’ve had to rely on our wits to get around.

  GPS receivers and other automated mapping and direction-plotting devices are the latest additions to our navigational toolkit. They also give the old story a new and worrisome twist. Earlier navigational aids, particularly those available and affordable to ordinary folks, were just that: aids. They were designed to give travelers a greater awareness of the world around them—to sharpen their sense of direction, provide them with advance warning of danger, highlight nearby landmarks and other points of orientation, and in general help them situate themselves in both familiar and alien settings. Satellite navigation systems can do all those things, and more, but they’re not designed to deepen our involvement with our surroundings. They’re designed to relieve us of the need for such involvement. By taking control of the mechanics of navigation and reducing our own role to following routine commands—turn left in five hundred yards, take the next exit, stay right, destination ahead—the systems, whether running through a dashboard, a smartphone, or a dedicated GPS receiver, end up isolating us from the environment. As a team of Cornell University researchers put
it in a 2008 paper, “With the GPS you no longer need to know where you are and where your destination is, attend to physical landmarks along the way, or get assistance from other people in the car and outside of it.” The automation of wayfinding serves to “inhibit the process of experiencing the physical world by navigation through it.” 4

  As is so often the case with gadgets and services that ease our way through life, we’ve celebrated the arrival of inexpensive GPS units. The New York Times writer David Brooks spoke for many when, in a 2007 op-ed titled “The Outsourced Brain,” he raved about the navigation system installed in his new car: “I quickly established a romantic attachment to my GPS. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line.” His “GPS goddess” had “liberated” him from the age-old “drudgery” of navigation. And yet, he grudgingly confessed, the emancipation delivered by his in-dash muse came at a cost: “After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could no longer get anywhere without her. Any trip slightly out of the ordinary had me typing the address into her system and then blissfully following her satellite-fed commands. I found that I was quickly shedding all vestiges of geographic knowledge.” The price of convenience was, Brooks wrote, a loss of “autonomy.”5 The goddess was also a siren.

  We want to see computer maps as interactive, high-tech versions of paper maps, but that’s a mistaken assumption. It’s yet another manifestation of the substitution myth. Traditional maps give us context. They provide us with an overview of an area and require us to figure out our current location and then plan or visualize the best route to our next stop. Yes, they require some work—good tools always do—but the mental effort aids our mind in creating its own cognitive map of an area. Map reading, research has shown, strengthens our sense of place and hones our navigational skills—in ways that can make it easier for us to get around even when we don’t have a map at hand. We seem, without knowing it, to call on our subconscious memories of paper maps in orienting ourselves in a city or town and determining which way to head to arrive at our destination. In one revealing experiment, researchers found that people’s navigational sense is actually sharpest when they’re facing north—the same way maps point.6 Paper maps don’t just shepherd us from one place to the next; they teach us how to think about space.

  The maps generated by satellite-linked computers are different. They usually provide meager spatial information and few navigational cues. Instead of requiring us to puzzle out where we are in an area, a GPS device simply sets us at the center of the map and then makes the world circulate around us. In this miniature parody of the pre-Copernican universe, we can get around without needing to know where we are, where we’ve been, or which direction we’re heading. We just need an address or an intersection, the name of a building or a shop, to cue the device’s calculations. Julia Frankenstein, a German cognitive psychologist who studies the mind’s navigational sense, believes it’s likely that “the more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.” Because computer navigation systems provide only “bare-bones route information, without the spatial context of the whole area,” she explains, our brains don’t receive the raw material required to form rich memories of places. “Developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.”7

  Other scientists agree. A British study found that drivers using paper maps developed stronger memories of routes and landmarks than did those relying on turn-by-turn instructions from satellite systems. After completing a trip, the map users were able to sketch more precise and detailed diagrams of their routes. The findings, reported the researchers, “provide strong evidence that the use of a vehicle navigation system will impact negatively on the formation of drivers’ cognitive maps.”8 A study of drivers conducted at the University of Utah found evidence of “inattentional blindness” in GPS users, which impaired their “wayfinding performance” and their ability to form visual memories of their surroundings.9 GPS-wielding pedestrians appear to suffer the same disabilities. In an experiment conducted in Japan, researchers had a group of people walk to a series of destinations in a city. Some of the subjects were given hand-held GPS devices; others used paper maps. The ones with the maps took more direct routes, had to pause less often, and formed clearer memories of where they’d been than did the ones with the gadgets. An earlier experiment, involving German pedestrians exploring a zoo, produced similar results.10

  The artist and designer Sara Hendren, commenting on a trip she made to attend a conference in an unfamiliar city, summed up how easy it is to become dependent on computer maps today—and how such dependency can short-circuit the mind’s navigational faculties and impede the development of a sense of place. “I realized that I was using my phone’s map application, with spoken cues, to make the same short trip between my hotel and a conference center just five minutes away, several days in a row,” she recalled. “I was really just willfully turning off the sphere of perception that I’ve relied on heavily most of my life: I made no attempt to remember landmarks and relationships and the look or feel of roads and such.” She worries that by “outsourcing my multi-modal responsiveness and memory,” she is “impoverishing my overall sensory experience.”11

  AS TALES of discombobulated pilots, truck drivers, and hunters demonstrate, a loss of navigational acumen can have dire consequences. Most of us, in our daily routines of driving and walking and otherwise getting around, are unlikely to find ourselves in such perilous spots. Which raises the obvious question: Who cares? As long as we arrive at our destination, does it really matter whether we maintain our navigational sense or offload it to a machine? An Inuit elder on Igloolik may have good reason to bemoan the adoption of GPS technology as a cultural tragedy, but those of us living in lands crisscrossed by well-marked roads and furnished with gas stations, motels, and 7-Elevens long ago lost both the custom of and the capacity for prodigious feats of wayfinding. Our ability to perceive and interpret topography, especially in its natural state, is already much reduced. Paring it away further, or dispensing with it altogether, doesn’t seem like such a big deal, particularly if in exchange we get an easier go of it.

  But while we may no longer have much of a cultural stake in the conservation of our navigational prowess, we still have a personal stake in it. We are, after all, creatures of the earth. We’re not abstract dots proceeding along thin blue lines on computer screens. We’re real beings in real bodies in real places. Getting to know a place takes effort, but it ends in fulfillment and in knowledge. It provides a sense of personal accomplishment and autonomy, and it also provides a sense of belonging, a feeling of being at home in a place rather than passing through it. Whether practiced by a caribou hunter on an ice floe or a bargain hunter on an urban street, wayfinding opens a path from alienation to attachment. We may grimace when we hear people talk of “finding themselves,” but the figure of speech, however vain and shopworn, acknowledges our deeply held sense that who we are is tangled up in where we are. We can’t extract the self from its surroundings, at least not without leaving something important behind.

  A GPS device, by allowing us to get from point A to point B with the least possible effort and nuisance, can make our lives easier, perhaps imbuing us, as David Brooks suggests, with a numb sort of bliss. But what it steals from us, when we turn to it too often, is the joy and satisfaction of apprehending the world around us—and of making that world a part of us. Tim Ingold, an anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, draws a distinction between two very different modes of travel: wayfaring and transport. Wayfaring, he explains, is “our most fundamental way of being in the world.” Immersed in the landscape, attuned to its textures and features, the wayfarer enjoys “an experience of movement in which action and perception are intimately coupled.” Wayfaring becomes “an ongoing process of growth and development, or self-renewal.” Transport, on the other hand, is “essen
tially destination-oriented.” It’s not so much a process of discovery “along a way of life” as a mere “carrying across, from location to location, of people and goods in such a way as to leave their basic natures unaffected.” In transport, the traveler doesn’t actually move in any meaningful way. “Rather, he is moved, becoming a passenger in his own body.”12

  Wayfaring is messier and less efficient than transport, which is why it has become a target for automation. “If you have a mobile phone with Google Maps,” says Michael Jones, an executive in Google’s mapping division, “you can go anywhere on the planet and have confidence that we can give you directions to get to where you want to go safely and easily.” As a result, he declares, “No human ever has to feel lost again.”13 That certainly sounds appealing, as if some basic problem in our existence had been solved forever. And it fits the Silicon Valley obsession with using software to rid people’s lives of “friction.” But the more you think about it, the more you realize that to never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation. If you never have to worry about not knowing where you are, then you never have to know where you are. It is also to live in a state of dependency, a ward of your phone and its apps.