Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough
(Blog:awalkingdelight)
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
The Glass Cage-Automation and Us
By: Nicholas Carr
Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
NICHOLAS G. CARR (AMERICAN WRITER-FORMER EDITOR OF HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW)
The Glass Cage, written by Harvard alumnus Nicholas Carr, ironically places him in the shoes of an uneducated English textile artisan of the 19th century, known as a Luddite.
Luddites protested against the industrial revolution because machines were replacing jobs formerly done by laborers. Just as the Luddites fomented arguments against mechanization, Carr argues automation creates unemployment and diminishes craftsmanship.
WORKMEN TAKE OUT THEIR ANGER ON MACHINES DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. (Just as the Luddites fomented arguments against mechanization, Carr argues automation creates unemployment and diminishes craftsmanship.)
Carr carries the Luddite argument a step further by inferring a mind’s full potential may only be achieved through a conjunction of mental and physical labor. Carr posits the loss of physical ability to make and do things diminishes civilization by making humans too dependent on automation.
There is no question that employment was lost in the industrial revolution; just as it is in the automation age, but jobs have been and will continue to be created as the world adjusts to this new stage of productivity.
Unquestionably, the advent of automation is traumatic but elimination of repetitive industrial labor by automation is as much a benefit to civilization as the industrial revolution was to low wage workers spinning textile.
The Covid19 pandemic of 2020 will accelerate world’ transition to automation. Though this book is written earlier than the pandemic’s economic consequence, corporations are reevaluating the necessity for office buildings to conduct their business. More and more employees will work from home.
Employment adjustment is traumatic. The trauma of this age is that work with one’s hands is being replaced by work with one’s brain. The education of the world needs to catch up with socio-economic change; just as labor did in the 20th century. To suggest humans do not learn when they cannot fly a plane, build a house, or construct an automobile with their own hands is a specious argument.
Houses and cars have not been built by one person since humans lived in caves and iron horses replaced carriage horses. Houses and cars were built by teams of people who worked with their hands but only on specific tasks. Those teams of people were managed by knowledge workers.
Service and education for society are the keys to the transition from industrialization to automation.
Automation of tasks reduces the mind numbing, low pay work of laborers. Automation turns manual labor into the development and education of people who design hardware and software to execute tasks that result in more safely flown planes, new houses, new cars, new refrigerators, so on and so on.
Carr suggests that airplane pilots should be given more control over automated planes they fly despite the facts he quotes that clearly show plane crashes kill fewer people today than ever in history. They are bigger, faster, and more complicated to fly. The argument that pilots need to learn how to fly a jumbo jet when automation fails is like telling a farmer to pull out his scythe to harvest the wheat because the thresher quit working.
Carr’s argument is that pilots have forgotten how to fly because automation replaced their skill set. To state the obvious, planes are not what they were 100 or even 10 years ago.
One might argue that Boeing’s 737 Max mistakes are evidence that Carr is correct in suggesting planes have become too complicated, but it ignores the reality of mistakes have always being made by humans. Humans are preternaturally motivated by self-interest.
Boeing’s leaders made mistakes in not fully analyzing and disclosing risks of 737 changes, and in not adequately training airline pilots on the safety features of the plane.
Carr raises a morality argument for not saving life when an automated machine makes a decision rather than a human being. One can suggest an example of how an automated machine is more likely to make the right decision than a human.
For example, presume a driver-less car is programmed to save its occupant when an injured bicyclist is laying in the street around a blind curve. A fast moving automated car with a family inside, with mountain cliffs on both sides of the road, will drive over the bicyclist without conscience. The bicyclist is dead but the car passengers are alive. If the car is driven by a person, both the cyclist and the family are likely dead.
Without doubt, many automation errors (e.g., the 737 Max) have been and will be made in the future, but to suggest automation is not good for society is as false as the Luddites arguments about industrialization.
This period of the world’s adjustment is horrendously disruptive. It is personal to every parent or person that cannot feed, clothe, and house their family or themselves because they have no job.
Decrying the advance of automation is not the answer. Making the right political decisions about how to help people make job transitions is what will advance civilization.
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