The Glass Cage

Automation and Us

By: Nicholas Carr

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

At once a celebration of technology and a warning about its misuse, The Glass Cage will change the way you think about the tools you use every day.

In The Glass Cage, bestselling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly people’s happiness and satisfaction are tied to performing hard work in the real world, Carr reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.

From nineteenth-century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the sterile landscapes of GPS maps, The Glass Cage explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective, examining the personal as well as the economic consequences of our growing dependence on computers.

With a characteristic blend of history and philosophy, poetry and science, Carr takes us on a journey from the work and early theory of Adam Smith and Alfred North Whitehead to the latest research into human attention, memory, and happiness, culminating in a moving meditation on how we can use technology to expand the human experience.

©2014 Nicholas Carr (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Cautionary tale of how humans might just get what they want and be poorer for it

A thoughtful and provocative book.

I was on my way to buying a Tesla self driving car. Now I think I will opt for a manual shift vehicle instead!

Seriously though, I have stopped using GPS and i'm happily figuring out how to get to places again. I did not realize how automation was deskilling me in various ways.

I I highly recommend this book.

Fantastic book!!

I don't regret getting this book one bit! It's quite an interesting listen, whether you agree or disagree with the message it's trying to deliver.

I highly recommend it!

Timely

I'm sure after the revelations of NSA monitoring this book would have taken a different turn, but it pursued the question of where does technology and the best human existence come together. this book was challenging but not intentionally negative. I'm going to happily share it with others.

start with The Shallows instead

not as engrossing or engaging as The Shallows was, which spent more time addressing neuroscience and human behavior. this is more focused on the tech perspective first and really only breezes over the actual science used to study AI.

nonetheless, Carr is great at making the case for critical thinking about humans and their relationship to technology.

so if you like The Shallows, this will be a great extension of that book.

More poetry than science

Beautifully written narrative with many meaningful reflections and human interest stories. However, it seems to me Nicholas Carr forgot to explore how evolutionary neuroscience reveals much about our automation of both our construction of reality and perception of it. Continuous mechanization and automation is what evolutionary biology does. Now, with our information technologies, we can do it consciously OR unconsciously. Our choice. Although dualism, where Carr seems to have hung his hat, has offered us much, the quest for a unitary physicalism has given us science.

Brilliant exposition

Tits book is a interpretation of automatization in our live, it future and pass. It look the evolution of humane machines and Etics to find the place of balance. A complex review of actual and fibrosis machines try to explains it place in our live and our place in a future fulfil with automatic machines.

One sided analysis of automation

The Glass Cage looks at automation through the viewpoint of what we as humans give up as AI makes our jobs easier. Pilots aren't as expert at flying as pilots used to be without autopilot, people don't get to experience the joy of being proficient at shifting a manual transmission car in the age of automatics, etc.

This is all true, but this book misses several important points.

First, while being an expert at a role is admirable and probably satisfying, that's not a reason not to change how things were done. 150 years ago, people used to be experts at writing long hand. That skill is now a lost art. I'm sure we've all lost something by not knowing how to write cursive, but I'll take the ease of typing and reading typed words over cursive any day. (this from a person that regularly must read 19th century handwritten legal deeds.)

Second, the book focuses exclusively on what the automation does to the experts, and not the benefits it can provide to the rest of us. Sure, autonomous cars may occasionally cause an accident due to software error or drivers that have become too complacent, but it will prevent many, many more accidents caused by human error from inattention, exhaustion, etc. Should we stop autonomous cars because there will be 100 driver fatalities a year attributable to them, and people will no longer get the satisfaction of driving themselves? No, because we have tens of thousands of driver deaths a year caused by humans and many people don't enjoy driving and will never be expert at it anyway.

In the end, the argument the Glass Cage seems to be making is that working at these tasks is the only way we can attain happiness. I would suggest that there are more satisfying ways to spend one's life than driving a truck, flying an airliner, or many of the other tasks people do for money that will some day be done by computers.

Superb, Engaging, and Frightening

Would you consider the audio edition of The Glass Cage to be better than the print version?

They are both good

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

His methodical and even voice

Have you listened to any of Jeff Cummings’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Yes. Jeff is one of the best narrators around.

If you could give The Glass Cage a new subtitle, what would it be?

The Beginning of the End

Any additional comments?

As a physician deeply concerned about the interposition of technology between my profession and the patients we care for, I found Nicholas Carr's books - The Shallows and The Glass Cage - as part of my research for a non-fiction book I'm writing for McFarland Publishing. Nicholas's writing has validated my fears, provided well-researched and annotated support for his arguments, and led me down several new paths of thought I had not considered. This book is superbly written, informatively, engaging, and, if you buy the audio version, narrated. If you've noticed that your doctor spends more time data entry than they do listening to you, these two books will hint as to why. I would recommend both books to anyone in the medical field and to anyone who feels that their creative edge, their focus, and intelligence may have been waning. It might not be you - Our computer's speedy processor may be making us all a bit slower.

Good look at the other side of tech

Wasn't as negative as I thought it might be. Fairly objective. More people should look at the "other side" of what tech brings.

Must read for understanding digital

It takes a couple chapters to get going. full of useful examples past and present. I've recommended this to friends.