The Glass Cage
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, best-selling 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 and reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented. This book 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. - Publisher.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
9mentions
9people
2014–2023years
22% recommend67% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This is the exact subject of the book; The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr. Airline industry avoids too much automation for this very reason.
Vigilance is hard to moderate when you start automating too much.
- Are they though?
The more I’ve read about human psychology - particularly about “flow” - the more valuable manually driven cars seem.
Similarly to how many people are actually happiest / have the highest sense of self-worth while at work (even though they’d scream otherwise), a lot of people are able to relax and think freely while driving. And in general, humans seem to enjoy having control over G-force (whether jumping off of cliffs, flying planes, riding roller coasters, driving...)
Flow: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Interesting take on automotive tech and psychology from Nicholas Carr’s “Glass Cage”, reviewed by NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/the-glass-ca...
- “IDEs considered harmful”. That's exactly the thesis of Nicholas Carr's book, “The Glass Cage”. He claims the more we employ cognitive-enhancing tools like IDEs to help us perform tasks that require mental effort, the less engaged we become, the less creative, and the less effort we're willing to apply in tackling other kinds of mental tasks. In short, “flow” stops when we disengage and let automation to do the job for us.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J9PQXOE/ref=dbs_a_def_a...
- This reminds me of the book The Glass Cage where the author talks about technology-centric design and human-centric design. I must agree that we shouldn't be changing humans to work with self driving cars. Cars should change humans and improve them as they are, not require us to behave in a certain way (or else risk getting run over).
- Clearly this review was not written with people like me as the intended audience, as the introductory paragraphs were almost completely incomprehensible to me on my first pass through them.
That said, what follows is an excellent argument for why Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage is terrible. I assume the introduction designed to prime the intended audience* for this argument.
* Which I assume is made up entirely of people whom I'd be very sad to find myself at a cocktail party with (although I expect they'd be similarly sad to find themselves at a cocktail party with me). I'm reminded of Cryptonomicon and Dr. G.E.B. Kivistic.
- Nominally, I'm "reading" 23 books that are in my Goodreads "currently reading" shelf. But of the ones that I'm really working on and will finish fairly soon:
1. Secret Societies - John Lawrence Reynolds
2. Black Wings of Cthulhu 3 - S.T. John (ed)
3. Unleash The Warrior Within - Richard Machowicz
4. Data Crush - Christopher Surdak
5. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
6. The Glass Cage: Automation and Us - Nicholas Carr
7. Future Shock - Alvin Toffler
8. The Balanced Scorecard - Robert S. Kaplan
