The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr

  Veteran architects’ intuitive sense of the centrality of sketching to creative thinking is supported by studies of drawing’s cognitive underpinnings and effects. Sketches on paper serve to expand the capacity of working memory, allowing an architect to keep in mind many different design options and variations. At the same time, the physical act of drawing, by demanding strong visual focus and deliberate muscle movements, aids in the forming of long-term memories. It helps the architect recall earlier sketches, and the ideas behind them, as he tries out new possibilities. “When I draw something, I remember it,” explains Graves. “The drawing is a reminder of the idea that caused me to record it in the first place.” 40 Drawing also allows the architect to shift quickly between different levels of detail and different degrees of abstraction, viewing a design from many angles simultaneously and weighing the implications of changes in details for the overall structure. Through drawing, writes the British design scholar Nigel Cross in his book Designerly Ways of Knowing, an architect not only progresses toward a final design but also hashes out the nature of the problem he’s trying to solve: “We have seen that sketches incorporate not only drawings of tentative solution concepts but also numbers, symbols and texts, as the designer relates what he knows of the design problem to what is emerging as a solution. Sketching enables exploration of the problem space and the solution space to proceed together.” In the hands of a talented architect, a sketchpad becomes, Cross concludes, “a kind of intelligence amplifier.” 41

  Drawing might best be thought of as manual thinking. It is as much tactile as cerebral, as dependent on the hand as on the brain. The act of sketching appears to be a means of unlocking the mind’s hidden stores of tacit knowledge, a mysterious process crucial to any act of artistic creation and difficult if not impossible to accomplish through conscious deliberation alone. “Design knowledge is knowing in action,” Schön observed, and it “is mainly tacit.” Designers “can best (or only) gain access to their knowledge in action by putting themselves into the mode of doing.” 42 Designing with software on a computer screen is also a mode of doing, but it’s a different mode. It emphasizes the more formal side of the work—thinking logically through a building’s functional requirements and how various architectural elements might best be combined to achieve them. By diminishing the involvement of the hand, that “tool of tools,” as Aristotle called it, the computer circumscribes the physicality of the task and narrows the architect’s perceptual field. In place of the organic, corporeal figures that emerge from the tip of a pencil or a piece of charcoal, CAD software substitutes, Schön argued, “symbolic, procedural representations,” which “are bound to be incomplete or inadequate in relation to the actual phenomena of design.” 43 Just as the GPS screen deadens the Inuit hunter to the Arctic environment’s faint but profuse sensory signals, the CAD screen restricts the architect’s perception and appreciation of the materiality of his work. The world recedes.

  In 2012, the Yale School of Architecture held a symposium called “Is Drawing Dead?” The stark title reflects a growing sense that the architect’s freehand sketch is being rendered obsolete by the computer. The transition from sketchpad to screen entails, many architects believe, a loss of creativity, of adventurousness. Thanks to the precision and apparent completeness of screen renderings, a designer working at a computer has a tendency to lock in, visually and cognitively, on a design at an early stage. He bypasses much of the reflective and exploratory playfulness that springs from the tentativeness and ambiguity of sketching. Researchers term this phenomenon “premature fixation” and trace its cause to “the disincentive for design changes once a large amount of detail and interconnectedness is built too quickly into a CAD model.” 44 The designer at the computer also tends to emphasize formal experimentation at the expense of expressiveness. By weakening an architect’s “personal, emotional connection with the work,” Michael Graves argues, CAD software produces designs that, “while complex and interesting in their own way,” often “lack the emotional content of a design derived from hand.” 45

  The distinguished Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa makes a related point in his eloquent 2009 book The Thinking Hand. He argues that the growing reliance on computers is making it harder for designers to imagine the human qualities of their buildings—to inhabit their works in progress in the way that people will ultimately inhabit the finished structures. Whereas hand-drawn sketches and handmade models have “the same flesh of physical materiality that the material object being designed and the architect himself embody,” computer operations and images exist “in a mathematicised and abstracted immaterial world.” Pallasmaa believes that “the false precision and apparent finiteness of the computer image” can stunt an architect’s aesthetic sense, leading to technically stunning but emotionally sterile designs. In drawing with a pen or pencil, he writes, “the hand follows the outlines, shapes and patterns of the object,” but when manipulating a simulated image with software, “the hand usually selects the lines from a given set of symbols that have no analogical—or, consequently, haptic or emotional—relation to the object.” 46

  The controversy over the use of computers in design professions will go on, and each side will offer compelling evidence and persuasive arguments. Design software, too, will continue to advance, in ways that may address some of the limitations of existing digital tools. But whatever the future brings, the experience of architects and other designers makes clear that the computer is never a neutral tool. It influences, for better or worse, the way a person works and thinks. A software program follows a particular routine, which makes certain ways of working easier and others harder, and the user of the program adapts to the routine. The character and the goals of the work, as well as the standards by which it is judged, are shaped by the machine’s capabilities. Whenever a designer or artisan (or anyone else, for that matter) becomes dependent on a program, she also assumes the preconceptions of the program’s maker. In time, she comes to value what the software can do and dismiss as unimportant or irrelevant or simply unimaginable what it cannot. If she doesn’t adapt, she risks being marginalized in her profession.

  Beyond the specifications of the programming, simply transferring work from the world to the screen entails deep changes in perspective. Greater stress is placed on abstraction, less on materiality. Calculative power grows; sensory engagement fades. The precise and the explicit take precedence over the tentative and the ambiguous. E. J. Meade, a founder of Arch11, a small architecture firm in Boulder, Colorado, praises the efficiencies of design software, but he worries that popular programs like Revit and SketchUp are becoming too prescriptive. A designer need only type in the dimensions of a wall or floor or other surface, and with a click of a button the software generates all the details, automatically drawing each board or concrete block, each tile, all the supports, the insulation, the mortar, the texture of the plaster. Meade believes the way architects work and think is becoming homogenized as a result, and the buildings they design are becoming more predictable. “When you flipped through architecture journals in the 1980s,” he told me, “you saw the hand of the individual architect.” Today, what you tend to see is the functioning of the software: “You can read the operation of the technology in the final product.” 47

  Like their counterparts in medicine, many veteran designers fear that the growing reliance on automated tools and routines is making it harder for students and younger professionals to learn the subtleties of their trade. Jacob Brillhart, an architecture professor at the University of Miami, believes that the easy shortcuts provided by programs like Revit are undermining “the apprenticeship process.” Relying on software to fill in design details and specify materials “only breeds more banal, lazy and uneventful designs that are void of intellect, imagination and emotion.” He also sees, again echoing the experience of doctors, a cut-and-paste culture emerging in his profession, with younger architects “pulling details, elevations, and wall sections off the office server from
past projects and reassembling them.” 48 The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.

  The danger looming over the creative trades is that designers and artists, dazzled by the computer’s superhuman speed, precision, and efficiency, will eventually take it for granted that the automated way is the best way. They’ll agree to the trade-offs that software imposes without considering them. They’ll rush down the path of least resistance, even though a little resistance, a little friction, might have brought out the best in them.

  “TO REALLY know shoelaces,” the political scientist and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford has observed, “you have to tie shoes.” That’s a simple illustration of a deep truth that Crawford explores in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: “If thinking is bound up with action, then the task of getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.” 49 Crawford draws on the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the deepest form of understanding available to us “is not mere perceptual cognition, but, rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things, which has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’ ”50

  We tend to talk about knowledge work as if it’s something different from and even incompatible with manual labor—I confess to having said as much in earlier sections of this book—but the distinction is a smug and largely frivolous one. All work is knowledge work. The carpenter’s mind is no less animated and engaged than the actuary’s. The architect’s accomplishments depend as much on the body and its senses as the hunter’s do. What is true of other animals is true of us: the mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brain but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso. And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well. “Thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be,” wrote the American philosopher and social reformer John Dewey in 1916. “Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain.”51 To act is to think, and to think is to act.

  Our desire to segregate the mind’s cogitations from the body’s exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we’re quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind’s work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we’re aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it’s separate from the body.

  According to UCLA psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, the illusion stems from the fact that when we contemplate our bodies, we draw on a different part of our brain than when we contemplate our minds. “When you think about your body and the actions of your body, you recruit a prefrontal and parietal region on the outer surface of your right hemisphere,” he explains. “When you think about your mind you instead recruit different prefrontal and parietal regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch each other.” When different areas in the brain process experiences, the conscious mind interprets those experiences as belonging to different categories. While the “hard-wired illusion” of mind-body dualism doesn’t reflect actual “distinctions in nature,” Lieberman emphasizes, it nevertheless has “immediate psychological reality for us.”52

  The more we learn about ourselves, the more we realize how misleading that particular “reality” is. One of the most interesting and illuminating areas of study in contemporary psychology and neuroscience involves what’s called embodied cognition. Today’s scientists and scholars are confirming John Dewey’s insight of a century ago: Not only are brain and body composed of the same matter, but their workings are interwoven to a degree far beyond what we assume. The biological processes that constitute “thinking” emerge not just from neural computations in the skull but from the actions and sensory perceptions of the entire body. “For example,” explains Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind at the University of Edinburgh who has written widely on embodied cognition, “there’s good evidence that the physical gestures we make while we speak actually reduce the ongoing cognitive load on the brain, and that the biomechanics of the muscle and tendon systems of the legs hugely simplify the problem of controlled walking.”53 The retina, recent research shows, isn’t a passive sensor sending raw data to the brain, as was once assumed; it actively shapes what we see. The eye has smarts of its own.54 Even our conceptual musings appear to involve the body’s systems for sensing and moving. When we think abstractly or metaphorically about objects or phenomena in the world—tree branches, say, or gusts of wind—we mentally reenact, or simulate, our physical experience of the things.55 “For creatures like us,” Clark argues, “body, world, and action” are “co-architects of that elusive thing that we call the mind.”56

  How cognitive functions are distributed among the brain, the sensory organs, and the rest of the body is still being studied and debated, and some of the more extravagant claims made by embodied-cognition advocates, such as the suggestion that the individual mind extends outside the body into the surrounding environment, remain controversial. What is clear is that we can no more separate our thinking from our physical being than we can separate our physical being from the world that spawned it. “Nothing about human experience remains untouched by human embodiment,” writes the philosopher Shaun Gallagher: “from the basic perceptual and emotional processes that are already at work in infancy, to a sophisticated interaction with other people; from the acquisition and creative use of language, to higher cognitive faculties involving judgment and metaphor; from the exercise of free will in intentional action, to the creation of cultural artifacts that provide for further human affordances.”57

  The idea of embodied cognition helps explain, as Gallagher suggests, the human race’s prodigious facility for technology. Tuned to the surrounding environment, our bodies and brains are quick to bring tools and other artifacts into our thought processes—to treat things, neurologically, as parts of our selves. If you walk with a cane or work with a hammer or fight with a sword, your brain will incorporate the tool into its neuronal map of your body. The nervous system’s blending of body and object is not unique to humans. Monkeys use sticks to dig ants and termites from the ground, elephants use leafy branches to swat away biting flies, dolphins use bits of sponge to protect themselves from scrapes while digging for food on the ocean floor. But Homo sapiens’s superior aptitude for conscious reasoning and planning enables us to design ingenious tools and instruments for all sorts of purposes, extending our mental as well as our physical capacities. We have an ancient tendency toward what Clark terms “cognitive hybridization,” the mixing of the biological and the technological, the internal and the external.58

  The ease with which we make technology part of our selves can also lead us astray. We can grant power to our tools in ways that may not be in our best interest. One of the great ironies of our time is that even as scientists discover more about the essential roles that physical action and sensory perception play in the development of our thoughts, memories, and skills, we’re spending less time acting in the world and more time living and working through the abstract medium of the computer screen. We’re disembodying ourselves, imposing sensory constraints on our existence. With the general-purpose computer, we’ve managed, perversely enough, to devise a tool that steals from us the bodily joy of working with tools.

  Our belief, intuitive but erroneous, that our intellect operates in isolation from our body leads us to discount the importance of involving ourselves with the world of things. That in turn makes it easy to assume that a computer—
which to all appearances is an artificial brain, a “thinking machine”—is a sufficient and indeed superior tool for performing the work of the mind. Google’s Michael Jones takes it as a given that “people are about 20 IQ points smarter now,” thanks to his company’s mapping tools and other online services.59 Tricked by our own brains, we assume that we sacrifice nothing, or at least nothing essential, by relying on software scripts to travel from place to place or to design buildings or to engage in other sorts of thoughtful and inventive work. Worse yet, we remain oblivious to the fact that there are alternatives. We ignore the ways that software programs and automated systems might be reconfigured so as not to weaken our grasp on the world but to strengthen it. For, as human-factors researchers and other experts on automation have found, there are ways to break the glass cage without losing the many benefits computers grant us.