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The glass cage : automation and us
Carr N., W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., New York, NY, 2014. 288 pp. Type: Book (978-0-393240-76-4)
Date Reviewed: Jul 27 2015

Nicholas Carr, in this book, discusses the fact that we humans are getting ”dumber,” as we are increasingly dominated by technology: the master of technology is turning into its slave. “Automation’s human consequences” are the theme of this book; however, Carr does not go into the theme of job losses, and doesn’t deal with the possible relationships of automation with other major issues–for example, with the strengthening of capital vis a vis the workforce, or with automation’s contribution to the growing gap between the rich and the poor.

Framing the effects of automation from an almost exclusively cognitivist perspective, Carr tries to demonstrate how much we are being caged by “bright screens” that can deprive us of the richness and complexity of the world “out there,” justifying the image conveyed by the title of the book, The glass cage: “As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: the glass cockpit can also be a glass cage”; “When we enter the glass cage, we’re required to shed much of our body. That doesn’t free us; it emaciates us.” As the body, the mind also loses a lot: “While decision-support software can help novice analysts make better judgments in the short run, it can also make them mentally lazy”; “In relieving us of repetitive mental exercise, [automation] also relieves us from deep learning.” “It may turn out that the late twentieth century’s ‘intellectualization of labor’ … was just a precursor to the early twenty-first century’s automation of intellect.” By promoting these oppositions, the book treats automation as having an intrinsic quality, a kind of “transcendent technological essence,” instead of relating it to the disputed context of its design and production. This supposed essence of automation allows Carr to bring it to the sphere of technological determinism, reinforced by a dark and dystopian conclusion: “Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.”

Throughout the book, Carr follows the path of a cognitive approach, always highlighting the impoverishment caused by automation in humans’ ability to know and to produce knowledge. There would be a world “out there,” the “real” world, the truthful one, stolen from us by the digital technologies of automation. A world existing prior to software and screens, made of “things in themselves,” supposedly reachable through direct contact, understood as moving out from the passive contemplation of screens to the dynamics of action.

In addition to platonically separating the world between the essence of “out there” and its appearance in the glass cage, an additional division takes place by keeping us (humans) and them (machines) apart. Not by chance, Carr asks just at the very beginning of his book, inspired by the political liberal tradition of the autonomous subject endowed with free will: “Automation confronts us with the most important question of all: What does human being mean?” (author’s emphasis). His solution lies in the separation of human beings from machines, as expressed in questions like: “Am I the master of the machine, or its servant? Am I an actor in the world or an observer? Am I an agent, or an object?” The answers to these questions are based on the dichotomy “us versus them”: “when we carry out the task or the job on our own, we seem to use different mental processes than when we rely on the aid of a computer” (emphasis mine). Carr thus postulates the existence of a pure human, apart from machines. Hence, he states that, from the moment software decreases the commitment to “our” work, “we hamper our ability to gain the kind of rich, real-world knowledge that leads us to know-how.” “We” are back to the “real” world, where knowledge should be not dependent on software, as justified by the following statements: “Automation tends to turn us from actor to observers,” and “What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?” Although accepting in a few rare moments the impossibility of separating a priori humans from machines, Carr insists most of the time on their dissociation–“We’re behind the wheel, but we can’t be sure who’s driving”– when it is neither feasible nor even necessary. The disjunction between human and non-human agency has been widely criticized by many authors, among them Bruno Latour, for whom “in each course of action, the great variety of agents seems to barge in and displace the original goals” [1].

Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, the knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled. It is this venerable source of uncertainty that we wish to render vivid again in the odd expression of an actor-network [1].

In order to separate us from them, Carr uses a problematic rhetorical resource: speech in the name of generic humanity. For example, “Automation tends to turn us from actor to observers” (emphasis mine), or “We’re inclined to desire things we don’t like and to like things we don’t desire” (emphasis mine). Who counts as part of “we” and “us”? Does the vast poor population of Latin America, where I live, count as part of “us”? Of course not, but speech on behalf of “all of us” is the hallmark of the old liberal humanism, featured, according to Katherine Hayles, by a “tendency to use the plural to give voice to a privileged few while presuming to speak for everyone” [2].

This generic “we” becomes even more problematic when Carr advances toward design and production of automated technology: “It’s up to us, the users and makers of tools, to anthropomorphize technology, to aim its cold blade wisely.” But after all, who are the makers of tools, if not a few designers and producers concentrated in very few countries? Ignoring this results in a text with a strong authoritarian and colonizer bias, configuring a voice intended to be a spokesman of humanity, when in fact, according to Hayles, it reveals indeed “how the use of the plural by the liberal humanist subject can appropriate the voices of subaltern others, who if they could speak for themselves might say something very different” [2].

It is also worth noting that automation appears in the book without its history, as if it were an inexorable fate imposed by scientific and technological progress. For example, there is no mention of the objectives of the research conducted in the US during World War II or the Cold War, by which one can realize that automation supported by digital computers was developed precisely for command-and-control relationships. And, without its history, automation results devoid of its politics. A rare exception to this trend can be witnessed especially in chapter 8, “Your Inner Drone,” when Carr temporarily abandons the rhetoric of wail and fear for a more daring and positive effort to open up the black box of automation and reveal some of the processes of its construction. Claiming that “we shouldn’t confuse those companies’ [top tech firms] interests with our own” or criticizing the new tech plutocrats for presenting a heroic narrative to justify the recent job losses as “unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating,” Carr allows us to see that if an alternative is desired, the first thing to do is show how automation has become this kind of “inhuman destiny.”

In short, the book seeks to call our attention to the dangers of automation, supported by a very rich set of references. However, it is not clear or specific about what and to whom this vigilance should be directed. “Unless we start having second thoughts about where we’re heading, that trend will only accelerate.” Unfortunately, the reader does not learn in this book what those second thoughts should be.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  Henrique Cukierman Review #: CR143653 (1510-0876)
1) Latour, B. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2005.
2) Hayles, N. K. How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1999.
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