Book

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

Jan 2014 🇺🇸 W. W. Norton & Company

The Glass Cage, published in 2014 (later reissued in paperback under the subtitle 'How Our Computers Are Changing Us'), extends the argument of Carr's essay 'The Great Forgetting' into a full book. He surveys automated systems in aviation, medicine, law, and architecture, describing a recurring pattern he calls a 'de-skilling' or 'generation' effect: professionals who rely on software to perform a task are, over time, associated with a weaker grasp of that task's underlying judgment than those who learned it manually. Carr is not opposed to automation itself; the book frames itself as balancing an appreciation of technology's benefits with a warning about uncritical reliance on it. Reviewed by the New York Times among other outlets, the book widens Carr's attention-and-cognition argument from reading and internet use specifically to software-mediated work generally. TechKids Foundation includes it as a documented extension of the attention-and-skill-erosion concern to automation broadly.

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CITATION

Carr, Nicholas. The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

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