Automation makes our lives easier
and safer, but it also makes us dumb, according to a new book. Pilots
are lulled into complacency as autopilot gets passengers to their
location safely; doctors rely on streamlined, computerized processes to
diagnose patients, and drivers prefer looking at their GPS instead of
street signs.
47% of U.S. employment is at risk of being automated within the next two decades. Automation certainly threatens our jobs, but also threatens the way we interact and function in the world. In his new book, “The Glass Cage,”
Nicholas Carr argues that automation erodes our skills, leads to
“automation complacency,” and dulls our interest in understanding the
world around us.
“The reason we’re so enamored of
automation and computers and software that do everything for us,” says
Carr, “is because it does relieve us of certain burdens and add
convenience to our lives.” But there’s a dark side to that, he warns.
Automation makes it easier for us to disengage from difficult tasks.
“What that means is you’re not pushed to go to the next level of
talent.”
While technologists might argue
that automation of difficult tasks would free us to do other, more
meaningful things, Carr doesn’t see that happening. “If you look at
places where work or activities have been highly automated… what you see
is the system start to turn skilled workers into computer operators.”
A major airline pilot, for
example, spends most of his or her time manning computer screens and
entering data. They only end up flying the plane for a short period of
time. “That’s not freeing them to think big thoughts about aviation,”
says Carr. “It’s making them more complacent… they begin to tune out,
they lose situational awareness and so when something goes wrong, you
suddenly see people making mistakes in high-risk situations.”
Carr argues that we also put too
much faith into automation, and give “undue weight,” to information
provided by computers. Not using human judgment to double check the work
of programs and algorithms can lead to major market crashes like the flash crash in 2010.
So will automation render us all
unskilled and useless? Not necessarily, says Carr. “The danger is that
we see more and more jobs being handed over to computers simply because
they’re more efficient,” he says. But warns that while, “you can program
a computer to do certain things, they’re never going to do it as well
as a person can.”
However, automation breeds
automation, according to Carr. We’re stuck in a cycle where “we’re
taking the tasks away from people and so people are less able to perform
them, so we say ‘well we need to bring in more computers because people
can’t do the job.’”
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