The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr

  Technology has always challenged people to think about what’s important in their lives, to ask themselves, as I suggested at the outset of this book, what human being means. Automation, as it extends its reach into the most intimate spheres of our existence, raises the stakes. We can allow ourselves to be carried along by the technological current, wherever it may be taking us, or we can push against it. To resist invention is not to reject invention. It’s to humble invention, to bring progress down to earth. “Resistance is futile,” goes the glib Star Trek cliché beloved by techies. But that’s the opposite of the truth. Resistance is never futile. If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, “the active soul,”37 then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the soul.

  One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a challenge, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but, as Frost saw, it’s the work—the means—that makes us who we are. Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face the same existential question that the Shushwap confronted: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?

  That sounds very serious. But the aim is joy. The active soul is a light soul. By reclaiming our tools as parts of ourselves, as instruments of experience rather than just means of production, we can enjoy the freedom that congenial technology provides when it opens the world more fully to us. It’s the freedom I imagine Lawrence Sperry and Emil Cachin must have felt on that bright spring day in Paris a hundred years ago when they climbed out onto the wings of their gyroscope-balanced Curtiss C-2 biplane and, filled with terror and delight, passed over the reviewing stands and saw below them the faces of the crowd turned skyward in awe.

  * The destructive potential of the scythe gains even greater symbolic resonance when one remembers that the orchise, a tuberous plant, derives its name from the Greek word for testicle, orkhis. Frost was well versed in classical languages and literature. He would also have been familiar with the popular image of the Grim Reaper and his scythe.

  NOTES

  Introduction: ALERT FOR OPERATORS

  1. Federal Aviation Administration, SAFO 13002, January 4, 2013, faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/airline_operators/airline_safety/safo/all_safos/media/2013/SAFO13002.pdf.

  Chapter One: PASSENGERS

  1. Sebastian Thrun, “What We’re Driving At,” Google Official Blog, October 9, 2010, googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html. See also Tom Vanderbilt, “Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here,” Wired, February 2012.

  2. Daniel DeBolt, “Google’s Self-Driving Car in Five-Car Crash,” Mountain View Voice, August 8, 2011.

  3. Richard Waters and Henry Foy, “Tesla Moves Ahead of Google in Race to Build Self-Driving Cars,” Financial Times, September 17, 2013, ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/70d26288-1faf-11e3-8861-00144feab7de.html.

  4. Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20.

  5. Tom A. Schweizer et al., “Brain Activity during Driving with Distraction: An Immersive fMRI Study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, February 28, 2013, frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00053/full.

  6. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2.

  7. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre, “Optimal Experience in Work and Leisure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56, no. 5 (1989): 815–822.

  8. Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future Affective States,” in Joseph P. Forgas, ed., Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179.

  9. Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, “Optimal Experience in Work and Leisure.”

  10. Quoted in John Geirland, “Go with the Flow,” Wired, September 1996.

  11. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1991), 157–162.

  Chapter Two: THE ROBOT AT THE GATE

  1. R. H. Macmillan, Automation: Friend or Foe? (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 1.

  2. Ibid., 91.

  3. Ibid., 1–6. The emphasis is Macmillan’s.

  4. Ibid., 92.

  5. George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), x.

  6. Bertrand Russell, “Machines and the Emotions,” in Sceptical Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), 64.

  7. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 7–10.

  8. Ibid., 408.

  9. Malcolm I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, U.K.: David & Charles, 1970), 50. See also E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” Past and Present 1, no. 1 (1952): 57–70.

  10. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 461–462.

  11. Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,” April 14, 1856, marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm.

  12. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 40.

  13. Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper.”

  14. Quoted in Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 41. In a famous passage in The German Ideology, published in 1846, Marx foresaw a day when he would be free “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Miswanting has rarely sounded so rhapsodic.

  15. E. Levasseur, “The Concentration of Industry, and Machinery in the United States,” Publications of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 193 (1897): 178–197.

  16. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 1051.

  17. Quoted in Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 117–118.

  18. Ibid., 50.

  19. Ibid., 55.

  20. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–373.

  21. John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the Wheeling Stadium,” in John F. Kennedy: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 721.

  22. Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 14. The emphasis is Aronowitz and DiFazio’s.

  23. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995), xv–xviii.

  24. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, Mass.: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). Brynjolfsson and McAfee extended their argument in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).

  25. “March of the Machines,” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 13, 2013, cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57563618/are-robots-hurting-job-growth/.

  26. Bernard Condon a
nd Paul Wiseman, “Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs,” AP, January 23, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs.

  27. Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon, “Will Smart Machines Create a World without Work?,” AP, January 25, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/will-smart-machines-create-world-without-work.

  28. Michael Spence, “Technology and the Unemployment Challenge,” Project Syndicate, January 15, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-supply-chains-on-the-move-by-michael-spence.

  29. See Timothy Aeppel, “Man vs. Machine, a Jobless Recovery,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2012.

  30. Quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “The Hollowing Out,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, July 8, 2012, campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/.

  31. See Lawrence V. Kenton, ed., Manufacturing Output, Productivity and Employment Implications (New York: Nova Science, 2005); and Judith Banister and George Cook, “China’s Employment and Compensation Costs in Manufacturing through 2008,” Monthly Labor Review, March 2011.

  32. Tyler Cowen, “What Export-Oriented America Means,” American Interest, May/June 2012.

  33. Robert Skidelsky, “The Rise of the Robots,” Project Syndicate, February 19, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-future-of-work-in-a-world-of-automation-by-robert-skidelsky.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Chrystia Freeland, “China, Technology and the U.S. Middle Class,” Financial Times, February 15, 2013.

  36. Paul Krugman, “Is Growth Over?,” The Conscience of a Liberal (blog), New York Times, December 26, 2012, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/.

  37. James R. Bright, Automation and Management (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1958), 4–5.

  38. Ibid., 5.

  39. Ibid., 4, 6. The emphasis is Bright’s. Bright’s definition of automation echoes Sigfried Giedion’s earlier definition of mechanization: “Mechanization is an agent—like water, fire, light. It is blind and without direction of its own. Like the powers of nature, mechanization depends on man’s capacity to make use of it and to protect himself from its inherent perils. Because mechanization sprang entirely from the mind of man, it is the more dangerous to him.” Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 714.

  40. David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 247.

  41. Stuart Bennett, A History of Control Engineering, 1800–1930 (London: Peter Peregrinus, 1979), 99–100.

  42. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo, 1954), 153.

  43. Eric W. Leaver and J. J. Brown, “Machines without Men,” Fortune, November 1946. See also David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 67–71.

  44. Noble, Forces of Production, 234.

  45. Ibid., 21–40.

  46. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 148–162.

  47. Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 251.

  48. Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.

  Chapter Three: ON AUTOPILOT

  1. The account of the Continental Connection crash draws primarily from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Accident Report AAR-10/01: Loss of Control on Approach, Colgan Air, Inc., Operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407, Bombardier DHC 8-400, N200WQ, Clarence, New York, February 12, 2009 (Washington, D.C.: NTSB, 2010), www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2010/aar1001.pdf. See also Matthew L. Wald, “Pilots Chatted in Moments before Buffalo Crash,” New York Times, May 12, 2009.

  2. Associated Press, “Inquiry in New York Air Crash Points to Crew Error,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2009.

  3. The account of the Air France crash draws primarily from BEA, Final Report: On the Accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203, Registered F-GZCP, Operated by Air France, Flight AF447, Rio de Janeiro to Paris (official English translation), July 27, 2012, www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf. See also Jeff Wise,“What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447,” Popular Mechanics, December 6, 2011, www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877.

  4. BEA, Final Report, 199.

  5. William Scheck, “Lawrence Sperry: Genius on Autopilot,” Aviation History, November 2004; Dave Higdon, “Used Correctly, Autopilots Offer Second-Pilot Safety Benefits,” Avionics News, May 2010; and Anonymous, “George the Autopilot,” Historic Wings, August 30, 2012, fly.historicwings.com/2012/08/george-the-autopilot/.

  6. “Now—The Automatic Pilot,” Popular Science Monthly, February 1930.

  7. “Post’s Automatic Pilot,” New York Times, July 24, 1933.

  8. James M. Gillespie, “We Flew the Atlantic ‘No Hands,’ ” Popular Science, December 1947.

  9. Anonymous, “Automatic Control,” Flight, October 9, 1947.

  10. For a thorough account of NASA’s work, see Lane E. Wallace, Airborne Trailblazer: Two Decades with NASA Langley’s 737 Flying Laboratory (Washington, D.C.: NASA History Office, 1994).

  11. William Langewiesche, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the “Miracle” on the Hudson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 103.

  12. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 20.

  13. Don Harris, Human Performance on the Flight Deck (Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 221.

  14. “How Does Automation Affect Airline Safety?,” Flight Safety Foundation, July 3, 2012, flightsafety.org/node/4249.

  15. Hemant Bhana, “Trust but Verify,” AeroSafety World, June 2010.

  16. Quoted in Nick A. Komons, Bonfires to Beacons: Federal Civil Aviation Policy under the Air Commerce Act 1926–1938 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1978), 24.

  17. Scott Mayerowitz and Joshua Freed, “Air Travel Safer than Ever with Death Rate at Record Low,” Denverpost.com, January 1 , 2012, denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_19653967. Deaths from terrorist acts are not included in the figures.

  18. Interview of Raja Parasuraman by author, December 18, 2011.

  19. Jan Noyes, “Automation and Decision Making,” in Malcolm James Cook et al., eds., Decision Making in Complex Environments (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007), 73.

  20. Earl L. Wiener, Human Factors of Advanced Technology (“Glass Cockpit”) Transport Aircraft (Moffett Field, Calif.: NASA Ames Research Center, June 1989).

  21. See, for example, Earl L. Wiener and Renwick E. Curry, “Flight-Deck Automation: Promises and Problems,” NASA Ames Research Center, June 1980; Earl L. Wiener, “Beyond the Sterile Cockpit,” Human Factors 27, no. 1 (1985): 75–90; Donald Eldredge et al., A Review and Discussion of Flight Management System Incidents Reported to the Aviation Safety Reporting System (Washington, D.C.: Federal Aviation Administration, February 1992); and Matt Ebbatson, “Practice Makes Imperfect: Common Factors in Recent Manual Approach Incidents,” Human Factors and Aerospace Safety 6, no. 3 (2006): 275–278.

  22. Andy Pasztor, “Pilot Reliance on Automation Erodes Skills,” Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2010.

  23. Operational Use of Flight Path Management Systems: Final Report of the Performance-Based Operations Aviation Rulemaking Committee/Commercial Aviation Safety Team Flight Deck Automation Working Group (Washington, D.C.: Federal Aviation Administration, September 5, 2013), www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/afs/afs400/parc/parc_reco/media/2013/130908_PARC_FltDAWG_Final_Report_Recommendations.pdf.

  24. Matthew Ebbatson, “The Loss of Manual Flying Skills in Pilots of Highly Automated Airliners” (PhD thesis, Cranfield University School of Engineering, 2009). See also M. Ebbatson et al., “The Relationship between Manual Handling Performance and Recent Flying Experience in Ai
r Transport Pilots,” Ergonomics 53, no. 2 (2010): 268–277.

  25. Quoted in David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 77.

  26. S. Bennett, A History of Control Engineering, 1800–1930 (Stevenage, U.K.: Peter Peregrinus, 1979), 141.

  27. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Picador, 1979), 152–154.

  28. Ebbatson, “Loss of Manual Flying Skills.”

  29. European Aviation Safety Agency, “Response Charts for ‘EASA Cockpit Automation Survey,’ ” August 3, 2012, easa.europa.eu/safety-and-research/docs/EASA%20Cockpit%20Automation%20Survey%202012%20-%20Results.pdf.

  30. Joan Lowy, “Automation in the Air Dulls Pilot Skill,” Seattle Times, August 30, 2011.

  31. For a good review of changes in the size of flight crews, see Delmar M. Fadden et al., “First Hand: Evolution of the 2-Person Crew Jet Transport Flight Deck,” IEEE Global History Network, August 25, 2008, ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/First-Hand:Evolution_of_the_2-Person_Crew_Jet_Transport_Flight_Deck.

  32. Quoted in Philip E. Ross, “When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?,” IEEE Spectrum, December 2011.

  33. Scott McCartney, “Pilot Pay: Want to Know How Much Your Captain Earns?,” The Middle Seat Terminal (blog), Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2009, blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to-know-how-much-your-captain-earns/.

  34. Dawn Duggan, “The 8 Most Overpaid & Underpaid Jobs,” Salary.com, undated, salary.com/the%2D8%2Dmost%2Doverpaid%2Dunderpaid%2Djobs/slide/9/.

  35. David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 20.

  36. Wilbur Wright, letter, May 13, 1900, in Richard Rhodes, ed., Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 33.

  37. Mindell, Digital Apollo, 20.

  38. Quoted in ibid., 21.

  39. Wilbur Wright, “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” speech before the Western Society of Engineers, September 18, 1901, www.wright-house.com/wright-brothers/Aeronautical.html.