The document discusses the impacts of automation on humans and society. It notes that automation can erode skills as tasks are handed off to computers, diminishing engagement. While automation may create new jobs, it also risks "deskilling" people and removing nuance from work. The document warns that an over-reliance on automation could weaken relationships and detach people from the real world if crucial human elements are lost. It argues that automation must be designed carefully and centered around human needs, not just technological capabilities, to avoid unintended negative consequences.

1. Book Summary
The Glass Cage
Who Needs Humans
Anyways
Nicholas Carr

2. Today we are not so much controlling our cars as sending inputs to the
computers that control them.

3. Google autonomous car resets the boundaries between human and
computer. Our ideas of the limits of automation has always been something
of a fiction.
We’re not as special as we think we are.

4. The computer is becoming our all purpose tool for navigating, manipulating
and understanding the world. In both its physical and its social
manifestations.
The trouble with automation is that it gives us what we don’t need at the cost
of what we do.

5. The belief in automation as a tool for liberation can be described as: every
time we offload a job to a tool or a machine of a software we free ourselves
to climb to a higher pursuit, one requiring greater dexterity, richer
intelligence or a broader perspective. We may lose something with each
upward step but what we gain is in the end, far greater.

6. “Paradox of work” Study conducted at University of Chicago.
The paradoxical situation of people having many more positive feelings at
work than in leisure, yet saying that they ‘wish to be doing something else’
when they are at work, not when they are in leisure. We’re terrible at
anticipating which activities will satisfy us and which will leave us
discontented.

7. There is also a social angle to our misjudging work and leisure. People allow
themselves to be guided by social conventions, a deep seated idea that
being at leisure is more desirable and carries more status than being at
work.

8. A job imposes a structure on our time that we lose when we’re left to our
own devices. We’re happiest when we are absorbed in a difficult task, a task
that has clear goals and that challenges us not only to exercise our talents
but to also stretch them.
Automation often removes complexity from our jobs, diminishing the
challenge they present and hence the engagement they promote. The apps
and other programs we use in our private lives have similar effects.

9. Thanks to our bias for leisure over work, ease over effort, we overestimate
automations benefits.

10. We know computers make certain jobs obsolete, but history suggests and
economists assume, that over the long haul productivity boosting
technology will create new occupations and raise standards of living.
The personal costs are even hazier. How do you measure the expense of an
erosion of effort and engagement or subtle deterioration of skill. Those are
the kinds of shadowy intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after
they’re gone. And even then we may have trouble expressing the losses in
concrete terms.

11. The choices we make or fail to make about which tasks we hand off to
computers and which we keep for ourselves are not just practical or
economic choices. They’re ethical choices.
Automation confronts is with the most important question. What does human
being mean?

12. Adam Smiths assessment of industrialization as an economic elixir seemed,
happily, to be borne out by the early history of industrialization and it
became a fixture of economic theory.
Machines were so commonplace in factories, so essential to industrial
production and competition that resisting their use came to be seen as an
exercise in futility.

13. The Great Depression curbed such enthusiasm. The economic collapse
prompted a bitter outcry against what was celebrated as the machine age.
Keynes spoke about technological unemployment. The ability of machines
to take over jobs that outpaced the economy’s ability to create valuable
work for people to do.
In the wake of the recession of 2008. The anxieties returned, stronger than
ever.

14. Growth and employment are diverging, says Nobel laureate Michael Pence.
And technology is the main reason why.
Information technology has changed is the distribution of occupation
creating a widening disparity in incomes and wealth.

15. The postwar years were characterized by intense labor strife. Military and
industrial planners saw automation as a way to shift the balance of power
back to management.
In an automated system, power concentrates with those who control the
programming.
This is the most important lesson to be gleaned from the long tumultuous
history of labor saving machines

16. Where computers sprint forward at the pace of Moore’s law, our own innate
abilities creep ahead with the tortoise like tread of Darwin’s law.
We’ll be compelled to change our own work, behavior and skills to the
capabilities and routines of the machines we depend on.

17. If you want to understand the human consequences of automation the first
place to look is up. What car designers are doing with computers today,
aircraft designers did decades ago.
Deep entanglement between human and mechanism was an elemental
source of flying's thrill. The A320s fly by wire system severed the tactile link
between pilot and plane. It inserted a digital computer between human
command and machine response. The commercial pilot has become a
computer operator. And that many aviation and automation experts believe
is a problem.
Heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots expertise, dull
their reflexes and diminish their attentiveness leading to a deskilling of the
crew.
The blurring of what it means to be a pilot offers a roadmap for much
broader transformation that society is going through now.

18. When people tackle a task with the aid of computers, they often fall victims
to a pair of cognitive biases. Automation complacency and automation
bias.
Automation complacency takes hold when a computer lulls us into false
sense of security. We become so confident that the machine will work
flawlessly, handling any challenge that may arise that we allow our attention
to drift.
Automation bias creeps in when people give undue weight to the
information coming through computers even when the information is wrong
or misleading, they believe it.

19. Our concentration and awareness can fade when we’re not routinely called
on interact with our surroundings.
When we automate cognitive tasks like problem solving, we hamper the
minds ability to translate information into knowledge and knowledge into
know-how.
Sharp tools. Dull minds.

20. Automation often becomes an impediment to skill building, in relieving us of
repetitive mental exercise it also relieves us of deep learning.
When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and
the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.

21. A study of primary care physicians who adopted electronic records
revealed “Deskilling outcomes” including “decreased clinical knowledge”
and “increased stereotyping of patients”.
Cloned documentation shears away nuance.
Computers alter in meaningful ways the interaction between physicians and
patients.

22. The progressive effect of automation is first to relieve the operator of manual
effort and then relieve him of the needs to apply continuous mental effort.
As more skills are built into the machine, it assumes more control over the
work and the workers opportunity to engage in and develop deeper talents,
such as those involved in interpretation and judgement, dwindles.
What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t.
The automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of
intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture
itself, our desire to understand the world.

23. Navigational aids like paper maps were designed to give travelers a greater
awareness of the world around them. Sharpen their sense of direction,
provide them with advance warning of danger, highlight nearby landmarks
and other points of orientation. Satellite navigation systems can do all those
things and more, but they’re not designed to deepen our involvement with
our surroundings. They’re designed to relieve us of the need for such
involvement.

24. So who cares. Is probably not the right question. What we should be
asking ourselves is, how far from the world do we want to retreat.

25. Like medicine, architecture teachers have warned that an over reliance on
computers can narrow a designers perspectives and degrade their talents
and creativity.

26. Embodied cognition. Not only are the brain and body composed of the
same matter, but their workings are interwoven to a degree far beyond what
we assume. The biological processes that constitute thinking emerge not just
from neural computations in the skull but also from the actions and sensory
perceptions of the entire body.
Automation impacts cognition.

27. The cure for imperfect automation is total automation. That’s a seductive
idea, but it’s simplistic. Machines share the fallibility of their makers.

28. Ergonomists call the prevailing approach ‘technology centered’
automation. Reflecting an almost religious faith in technology and an
equally fervent distrust of humans. It substitutes misanthropic goals for
humanistic ones.

29. Human factors experts have urged designers to move to ‘human centered’
automation.

30. The tension between technology cantered and human centered automation
is not just a theoretical concern. It affects decisions made every day by
business executives, engineers, programmers and government regulators.
In aviation, the two dominant aircraft manufacturers have been on different
sides of the design question since the introduction of fly-by-wire systems
thirty years ago. Airbus pursued a technology centered approach. It’s goal
is to make its planes essentially pilot proof. The software, not pilot, wields
ultimate control.
Boeing has taken a more human centered approach in designing its fly-by-
wire craft. The aviator retains final authority over maneuvers, even in
extreme circumstances.

31. Frictionless becomes a problematic ideal. It can sap us not only of know-
how but also our sense that know-how is something important and worth
cultivating.
Spell checkers once served as tutors, you learnt as you used them. With
auto correct there’s no feedback, no friction, you see nothing and learn
nothing.

32. Social networks are propelled by statistical “discovery” of potential friends
and clickable tokens of affection. Meaningful bonds are not forged by
automating many of the time consuming aspects of personal relationships.
People aren’t nodes on a network grid. True bonds require trust, courtesy
and sacrifice. Removing friction from social attachments does not
strengthen them, it weakens them. More like the attachments between
consumers and products, easily formed and just as easily broken.

33. The arrival of autonomous vehicles would be a start of a new era in which
machines will need to have ethical systems. Moral codes will have to be
translated, however imperfectly, into software codes.

34. Fully automated computer controlled killing machines or LAR, Lethal
Autonomous Robots, are technologically feasible today. To a computer, a
decision to fire isn’t very different from a decision to trade stocks. An
algorithm is an algorithm.
With LARs and lower cost on human lives, the pressure on governments to
automate war will be irresistible.
With reduced “human costs of armed conflict” the public may be
increasingly disengaged from military debates. Leading to a normalization
of armed conflict.

35. Substitution myth is defined as the erroneous assumption that a job can be
divided into separate tasks and these tasks can be automated piecemeal
without changing the nature of the job as a whole.

36. We live in a geeks paradise, the world a programmable machine. It
becomes hard to know what is controlling what, what is connected to what,
where information is flowing and how it’s being used. We’d have to place a
lot of trust in the people and companies running the systems.
Be connecting us to a symbolic elsewhere, the smartphone, exiles us from
the here and now. We lose the power of presence. It will only get worse with
wearables.

37. We’ve put into motion a cycle that, depending on your point of view, is
either virtuous or vicious. As we grow more reliant on applications and
algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid - we
experience skill tunneling as well as attention tunneling.

38. If we don’t understand the commercial, political, intellectual and ethical
motivations of the people writing the software or the limitations inherent in
automated data processing, we open ourselves to manipulation.

39. When an inscrutable technology becomes invisible technology, we would
be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology’s assumptions and
biases have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know
whether the software is aiding us or controlling us.
We’re behind the wheel, but can’t be sure who’s driving.

40. To ensure society’s wellbeing in the future, we may need to place limits on
automation. We may have to shift our view of progress, putting the emphasis
on social and personal flourishing rather than technological advancement.