"The Glass Cage" by Nicholas Carr

Above: "The Glass Cage" - Nicholas Carr - 232 pages.

We have some work to do, as existing in a dumbed down state seems to be the operative paradigm for too many of us today.

I completed reading this book today. Hat tip: F16.

Carr's main point in this book: As automation gains more purchase in society, something essential is being stolen from us as well.

This book was recommended to me by F16 after he heard me bemoan what I saw as the dumbing down of modern life. I felt that notwithstanding the benefit of tech improvements, we were also losing something important...the ability to do basic practical stuff.

Following are three examples I gave to F16.

1. The LDS have dumbed down the score arrangements of their hymns. Apparently, there aren't enough organists trained to handle the original, more complex arrangements. I can understand the thinking behind this. As the Church grows throughout the world, there won't always be keyboard ready organists to handle a complex organ arrangement. And... the hymns at church must have organ accompaniment, right? Solution? Dumb down the score. Also, new electronic organs have features that dumb down the complexity of organ itself. A "bass coupler" stop enables bass notes to be played without using the foot pedals. I have been called to be a back-up organist in the local LDS ward and stake. Has it come to this? Calling on a 74 year old geezer to accompany hymns? Don't get me wrong. I enjoy helping out. But, doesn't anyone know how to play the organ any more?

2. Most American drivers' skills don't go beyond rudimentary use of the vehicle steering wheel, accelerator, break pedal, and sound system. Automatic transmissions were a rarity when I started driving in 1960. I still cringe when I see vehicles on a descent repeatedly hitting their brake lights. Don't people know how to use the transmission to govern their speed ? Also, no one these days seems to know how to overtake on a two lane road. It is not infrequent that I overtake a line of three or four vehicles, each reluctant to overtake vehicles ahead mindlessly following slow moving vehicle without attempting to overtake it. My first car, a '55 Chevy, had roll up windows, a four speed standard transmission, no power brakes, no power steering, no proximity warning systems, no A/C yada. In those days roads were narrower, there were no freeways. Drivers then were well versed in overtaking on two lane roads, use of high beams etc. Driving then was a more complex challenge, in many ways, then than it is today. Have we lost something by having the erstwhile complex task of driving made easier? Are we dumber today than our forebears who had to use more brain power to drive a car?

3. Are OSHA guidelines and resultant "improvements" to public space unequivocally a good thing? I have to be super skilled to walk through a chowk in an Indian city. I'm walking in the same space where motorcycles are whipping by me within inches; where road surfaces have obstructions, broken tiles, or potholes; where pedestrians proliferate in numbers. I see the eyes of the oncoming motorcyclists, focusing intently on the route ahead, as their right hand deftly covers the front brake lever. Indian motorcyclists have to be super skilled, just to survive, as they sashay around pedestrians, produce laden carts and stray cows. We pedestrians have to be equally focused to counter the risk of a motorcycle hitting us, or of tripping on an obstacle in the roadway ahead. I get the benefits of a well built sidewalk, ramps for wheel chairs, and well designed cross walks with stop lights. But, how many times in the US have we seen a person looking at her phone texting while walking in a crosswalk? Are we Americans loosing brain function by making it too easy to cross the street?

Carr's book adresses questions like those I have posed above, though in his book he focuses more specifically on unintended consequences of robots and computers.

One of the most important learnings from the book for me was that, as you would expect, brain activity increases as tasks become more complex. But, there is a level of complexity which if forced on the brain will cause the brain to explode, metaphorically speaking.

In this regard, I loved Carr's account of "The Dancing Mouse," by Harvard psychologist Robert M. Yerkes, published in 1907.

Yerkes was given fifty mice by a friend. He decided to perform an experiment with the mice. He put the mice in a box with two exits. One exit was colored white and the other exit was black colored. The smell of cheese on the other side of each exits enticed the mice to go through one of the two doors to get the cheese. The mice who went through the white exit happily raced to the cheese. The mice who went through the black exit were given an electric shock. Yerkes wanted to see how quickly a mouse shocked in the black exit would start to routinely take the white exit. Yerkes performed the shock treatment at three levels: light, medium, and intense. He surmised that the mice going through the black exit, shocked intensively, would be the quickest to learn to take white exit. He was wrong. The mice receiving the medium shock learned the quickest to take the white exit. The mice receiving the benign shock were next... they learned slowly... didn't care much one way or the other which door they went through, but eventually, albeit slowly, they learned to take the white exit. The heavily shocked mice just went nuts. They didn't learn a thing. Many of them would repeat entry into the black door time and time again, notwithstanding the heavy shock.

What's the conclusion of Yerke's experiment? That brains have an optimal level of challenge where they operate at their most effective. The idea in life, when learning or dealing with work or the day to day, is to operate at or near the optimal brain activity level. In this way we maximize personal growth and development. We give purpose to life if our brains are working effectively. If we're operating at more modest levels of brain activity, we're not growing. If we try to overload our brains we become dysfunctional. Either way, overload or underload, we're not optimizing our human potential. Only by challenging our brains at the optimal level can we avoid feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness. NOTE: Why Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) is a bad idea.

Clearly, the computer, with its myriad of software applications, has enhanced human progress. Robots now manufacture many products more precisely at lower costs than humans ever could.

But, is it all good?

Airliners can now be designed to fly autonomously. Some people have called airline pilots nothing more than glorified computer input/output clerks. But, we haven't yet come up with a way to totally eliminate the human factor in flying. The complexity of outcomes in flight is too great to account for all contingencies.

Airlines have determined that we still need pilots. But, they have also found that they were automating too much in the piloted plane. When flying was made too easy, the pilots behaved like Yerkes' soft shocked mice. A requirement for low level pilot involvement in flying the plain resulted in pilot laziness and lack of focus. When contingencies occurred, too many pilots in "over automated" cockpits were found asleep at the switch. So, even though most flying processes could be automated, airlines re-inserted more manual steps into the flying task to ensure the pilots remained attentive...to ensure, as it were, that their brains were engaged at the optimal level...like the medium shocked mice.

There is a great chapter in the book about medical care. "Experts" thought that by automating medical records care quality would improve. Well... not always. The ability for doctors to cut and paste the diagnosis of one patient into the record of another patient has led to too many doctors lazily skipping over unique patient differences.

The same goes for big data medical diagnosis. It would seem that big data techniques, analyzing thousands of different cases and symptoms would come up with a better diagnosis than the doctor would do on the strength of his/her own training. Right? Not always. There is evidence that doctors over relying on big data diagnosis are missing important diagnostic conclusions by overlooking individual patient specific symptoms. Ie. big data diagnostic techniques can lead to lazy doctors.

Carr is not sure driverless cars are coming as fast as conventional wisdom says. There are moral questions about programing the "self driving" car that current technology is not ready to accommodate. Say, the driverless car, with a mom in front and a baby in the back seat, is going down an icy road and a pedestrian races into the car's path. Suppose big data analysis on this situation says that if the car brakes for the pedestrian, there is a 40% chance that the car will veer off the road, missing the pedestrian, and 50% chance, if it does veer off the road, that the baby will be killed. How should the software programmer program this moral dilemma... or hundreds of thousands of variants similar to it? Carr says the human is still unique and the moral capability of robotics is a long way in coming. Don't think, he says, that driverless cars are going to be the default any time soon.

The GPS. A modern miracle, right? Carr shows evidence that a slavish dependence on GPS navigation can result in a diminishment of spatial awareness necessary to otherwise function adequately in other dimensions of life. I recall following motorcyclist friends on rides, who slavishly follow the prompts of the GPS, who I know are going the wrong way. The GPS is not always right. Using the GPS without a good sense of spatial awareness is just another aspect of the dumbing down process we seem to be going through as a culture.

Carr draws 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 points out that shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.

Carr ends his book with a meditation on ways we can use technology to expand the human experience while at the same time keeping our brains active, alert and engaged. We have some work to do, as existing in a dumbed down state seems to be the operative paradigm for too many of us today.

"The Glass Cage" is an important book to help us better understand the implications of a world where many of the functions traditionally performed by humans are performed by software and robots.

Recommend!