The Glass Cage: Automation and Us Read Online Free

the rigors of labor. We’ll sentence ourselves to idleness.

    I S IT any wonder we’re enamored of automation? By offering to reduce the amount of work we have to do, by promising to imbue our lives with greater ease, comfort, and convenience, computers and other labor-saving technologies appeal to our eager but misguided desire for release from what we perceive as toil. In the workplace, automation’s focus on enhancing speed and efficiency—a focus determined by the profit motive rather than by any particular concern for people’s well-being—often has the effect of removing complexity from jobs, diminishing the challenge they present and hence the engagement they promote. Automation can narrow people’s responsibilities to the point that their jobs consist largely of monitoring a computer screen or entering data into prescribed fields. Even highly trained analysts and other so-called knowledge workers are seeing their work circumscribed by decision-support systems that turn the making of judgments into a data-processing routine. The apps and other programs we use in our private lives have similar effects. By taking over difficult or time-consuming tasks, or simply rendering those tasks less onerous, the software makes it even less likely that we’ll engage in efforts that test our skills and give us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. All too often, automation frees us from that which makes us feel free.
    The point is not that automation is bad. Automation and its precursor, mechanization, have been marching forward for centuries, and by and large our circumstances have improved greatly as a result. Deployed wisely, automation can relieve of us drudge work and spur us on to more challenging and fulfilling endeavors. The point is that we’re not very good at thinking rationally about automation or understanding its implications. We don’t know when to say “enough” or even “hold on a second.” The deck is stacked, economically and emotionally, in automation’s favor. The benefits of transferring work from people to machines and computers are easy to identify and measure. Businesses can run the numbers on capital investments and calculate automation’s benefits in hard currency: reduced labor costs, improved productivity, faster throughputs and turnarounds, higher profits. In our personal lives, we can point to all sorts of ways that computers allow us to save time and avoid hassles. And thanks to our bias for leisure over work, ease over effort, we overestimate automation’s benefits.
    The costs are harder to pin down. We know computers make certain jobs obsolete and put some people out of work, but history suggests, and most economists assume, that any declines in employment will prove temporary and that over the long haul productivity-boosting technology will create attractive 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 a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill? You can’t. 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. But the costs are real. 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. They shape the substance of our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world. Automation confronts us with the most important question of all: What does human being mean?
    Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre discovered something else in their study of people’s daily routines. Among all the leisure activities reported by their test subjects, the one that generated the greatest sense of flow was driving a car.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    The epigraph to this book is the concluding stanza of William Carlos