Unit 8, Listening 1, Automation and Us


Automation and Us

Host:     Now as we heard earlier from Andrew McAfee, our increasingly automated world is cause for concern and planning, especially when it comes to the future of employment. Or . . . automation could give us what we always wanted: a life free from the drudgery[1] of work. Right?

Nicholas Carr: There have been studies that show that we think we don’t like to work, so when people are at work and you ask them what they’d rather be doing, they say, “Well, I’d rather be at leisure[2], or idle.”

Host:     Mm-hmm.

Carr:      And yet, when you actually study their feelings, you see that when people are at work, they tend to be happier, more satisfied, more fulfilled than when they’re not at work.

Host:     That’s Nicholas Carr, author of the new book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. He’s thought a lot about humans and work.

Carr:      So we have this situation that psychologists refer to as “mis-wanting”: that we think we want to be freed from labor[3], but actually it’s when we’re working hard and facing challenges and exercising our talents that we feel most fulfilled and most satisfied with life.

Host:     Part of your argument is that our overreliance[4] on expert systems and artificial intelligence[5] is actually having a negative impact on performance, for instance with doctors. So what are some of the problems with doctors relying on automation?

Carr:      There’s been an assumption that you can just bring computers into the medical profession. For instance, changing paper record-keeping with electronic record-keeping, and that would make things more efficient, allow doctors to share patient records more quickly, but it wouldn’t really change the way doctors practice medicine. And what we’re finding, in fact, is that there are all sorts of unanticipated[6], very subtle changes that happen when, for instance, primary care physicians start bringing computers or tablets into the examination room. When you have a doctor with a computer, the doctor will tend to order more diagnostic tests—more that turned out to be unnecessary—with a computer. Everybody thought, oh, if you have a tablet, that you can call up previous blood tests or X-rays, then doctors wouldn’t be so quick to order new ones, and in fact, it seems to work exactly the opposite way: that doctors think, well, if I order a test, it will be really easy to get it on my tablet, so I’ll just go ahead and order tests. And as anybody who has gone in for a physical or an exam and had their doctor use a computer, which is now more and more common, you certainly know that the doctor spends a lot of time, in general, looking at the computer screen, and this too comes out in the research that’s been done, that when you’re in an exam room with a doctor with a computer, the doctor spends about 25 to 50 percent of the time looking at the screen. And that leaves both patients and doctors a little uncomfortable. They’re both aware that there isn’t as intimate a connection being made between doctor and patient as there used to be when the doctor gave you his or her full attention.

Host:     Right. You know, one of my personal obsessions is the role of the body and how we understand the world around us and how we behave intelligently. So what’s your sense of the role of the body and what’s at risk with increased automation?

Carr:      If there’s, you know, one overarching[7] kind of philosophical concern I have, it’s that we’re trading deep engagement with the world—an engagement that includes our mind, but also our body—and we’re replacing that with a more generic form of simply doing things through computer screens. So if you look at pilots, for instance, there’s a job that requires—or at least in the past—you know, a great deal of psychomotor[8] skills—thinking but also acting with your body, coordinating all that. Now, more and more the flying of a plane—the actual physical flying of a plane—is done by autopilot systems and other automated systems. The pilot’s job becomes one of looking at screens and entering data into computers. Architects, the same thing; lawyers, more and more that’s happening . . . and in our personal lives too, a lot of our time now is devoted to looking at screens and being kind of data-entry clerks for our own lives. And so what you see is this kind of uniformity in activity, uniformity in skill and talent, where you used to have this great deal of diversity, and you used to have people building these very subtle talents that involved engaging with the world in all sorts of different ways, and it could be, you know, the early stages of a great loss in the diversity of human activity, human thought, human talent as all of us come to spend more and more time just interacting with a computer and a computer screen.

Host:     But on the other hand, isn’t flying, for instance, safer than ever before, thanks to automation?

Carr:      It’s certainly much, much safer. The whole history of flight over the last hundred years has been one of, you know, steady increases in safety, and I think it’s pretty clear that autopilots and other automation systems have played an important role in that—not the only role. What the aviation experience tells us is that some degree of automation may be good, and then if you push it even further, it may start turning bad. So we’ve had this history of automation helping to increase flight safety, but in recent years, as the computer has kind of taken over more and more of the job of the pilot, and you know on an average flight these days the pilot is actually in manual control of the plane for only about three minutes. And what happens then is that they start to lose situational[9] awareness. They fall victim to what researchers call “automation complacency[10].” And then if something happens—if the autopilot system breaks down or they run into some unusual weather and are suddenly forced to retake manual control of the plane—because their skills have gotten rusty[11], because they’ve lost the awareness of what’s going on around them, they start making mistakes. And unfortunately, you know, there have been some catastrophic plane crashes in recent years that are associated with this kind of dependency on automation. What the airline example tells us is not that automation is bad but that more automation is not necessarily good and also that the way you design these systems is incredibly important. . . .


[1] drudgery: noun hard, boring work

[2] at leisure: idiom with no particular activities; free

[3] labor: noun hard physical work

[4] overreliance: noun relying too much on something

[5] artificial intelligence: noun an area of study concerned with making computers copy intelligent human behavior

[6] unanticipated: adjective that you have not expected or predicted

[7] overarching: adjective very important, because it includes or influences many things

[8] psychomotor: adjective relating to both the brain and the movement of the body that is produced by muscles; connected with the nerves that control movement

[9] situational: adjective depending on the circumstances and things that are happening at a particular time and in a particular place

[10] complacency: noun a feeling of satisfaction with yourself or with a situation, so that you do not think any change is necessary

[11] rusty: adjective not as good as it used to be, because you have not been practicing

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