An Interview with Nicholas Carr
A few months ago I got the chance to interview Nicholas Carr about his new book, The Glass Cage, which got me thinking about all kinds of things, including what I see as my kids' schools' overemphasis on computer programs for testing, homework, and learning. Here's my long question about that subject that I didn't include in the interview that ran on PBS MediaShift.
Me: The area in which the rise of automation bothers me the most is in school test taking. My son just started kindergarten, and before his first day in the classroom he had to come in and take a test. I assumed it would be one-on-one with the teacher, as my daughter's kindergarten assessment had been three years earlier. But as I waited for him to finish, the teacher came out and asked, "Has he ever used a computer before?" They had him taking the test with a right-handed mouse without checking that he was left-handed (and he hasn't used a computer much before—just an iPad, a little). The guidelines from the American Society of Pediatrics urge parents to limit kids' screen time, but school tests seem reward and encourage more screen time. My daughter's teacher told me that kids who spent more time on computers (and less time reading) earned higher reading scores on the new computer test. I don't have a problem with testing in general, but this kind of testing seems to be a waste of time, and not to measure what it purports to measure.
Carr: This is an entirely wrong-headed approach and runs counter to pretty much everything we know about child development. But technology promises a quick fix, and at the moment, in education and elsewhere, that seems to be want we want.
Me: As you've been touring with this book, have people in the audience shared their own stories of automation gone amok? What are some of the best ones?
Carr: Well, I’ve heard a lot of stories of people being led astray by GPS systems and being embarrassed by autocorrecting spellchecks. But the most compelling stories have been those from doctors and nurses who have been forced to use software that is being installed for monetary reasons rather than medical ones.
And here's an excerpt from the PBS MediaShift interview:
Writer Nicholas Carr has earned his reputation as one of the premier contemporary critics of technological utopianism through articles such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which he published in The Atlantic in 2008 and lucid, insightful books including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” and his new “The Glass Cage: Automation and Us<.” Some might accuse him of technophobia, but he isn’t advocating that everyone smash their smartphones. Instead, he urges a balanced, thoughtful approach toward our engagement with technology rather than a blind acceptance that each new gizmo will enhance our work and our lives, even if our bosses or friends tell us it will. I recently interviewed Carr via email about “The Glass Cage” and how some recent technological advances might be making us dumber, less skilled, less happy, and less moral.
Nicholas Carr in 2008. Photo by Sandy Fleischmann and used with Creative Commons license.
Shank: It seems to me that one idea underlying both “The Glass Cage” and “The Shallows” is that humanity has recently undergone an unprecedented expansion in technology, and that some problems have arisen because many people tend to accept any new technology as being automatically beneficial, without questioning it. Do you think there will come a point when more people begin to question and reject or selectively use automation technology?
Carr: I wouldn’t necessarily say that the current explosion in technology is unprecedented. If you look at the advances that were under way 100 years ago, with electrification, drugs and medical technologies, telecommunications, and the automobile, I think you could make a case that progress today has actually narrowed. But it’s true that computers, smartphones, and software are very quickly and very deeply changing the way we act and think as well as the texture and pace of our lives. The speed with which this is playing out has made it very hard to step back and take a critical view of the changes. We’ve all been caught up in a whirlwind.
Still, I do sense that more people are coming to have doubts about where we’re headed and in particular about our rush to automate subtle skills that are essential not only to the economy but to people’s sense of personal achievement and fulfillment. So I think we will see more questioning of the pace and direction of automation over the next few years. What’s hard to predict is whether the resistance, or even questioning, will become strong enough to counter the enormous momentum that’s propelling computerization forward. I guess I’m not optimistic there, but I’m not despairing, either.
Shank: You mentioned in a recent talk at Google that you started out as a technology journalist reviewing or commenting on the features of new tech products and companies, and like many tech journalists you didn’t question whether the new technology was even necessary or beneficial. We expect the companies that sell these products to hype them, but is there also a tendency for people who aren’t employed by tech companies, such as journalists or even users, to go along with the line that most every technological advance is beneficial?
Carr: I think we humans are naturally enthusiastic about new gadgets and gizmos — they can be amazing, after all — but that bias, while completely understandable, does make us much more susceptible to blindly buying into the marketing messages streaming out of Silicon Valley. More disturbing to me is the way that the news media has become an amplifier of technology marketing, giving exhaustive coverage to even fairly routine product announcements. I mean, when you look at how carefully companies like Apple and Amazon and Facebook and Google choreograph their “media events,” and how reliably the media plays its appointed role, it’s hard not to feel a little repulsed. The only precedent that I can think of is the coverage of Hollywood — but now smartphones and apps are the celebrities.
Shank: Your books have been widely critically acclaimed — “The Shallows” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — but it seems that when reviewers do criticize them, their main argument is that you are just an “anti-technology” doomsayer. How do you answer that criticism?
Carr: I’m pretty much immune to it at this point. A lot of people worship technology – it’s become kind of central to their sense of self – so any criticism of technology provokes a knee-jerk reaction from them. It’s easier to scream “Luddite” or “technophobe” than to think. Most people, though, are not so defensive or blinkered – in giving my talk at Google, for instance, I found most everyone there very willing to consider my point of view – and so I try to aim my work at the open-minded rather than worry too much about the closed-minded.
Shank: “The Glass Cage” made explicit for me a number of problems with automation that I had been vaguely worried about. But one thing that I had never worried about until reading “The Glass Cage” was the morality of the Roomba. You write, “Roomba makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect.” Why is it so easy to overlook the fact, as I did, that when a Roomba vacuums indiscriminately, it’s following a moral code?
Carr: It’s easier not to think about it, frankly. The workings of automated machines often raise tricky moral questions. We tend to ignore those gray areas in order to enjoy the conveniences the machines provide without suffering any guilt. But I don’t think we’re going to be able to remain blind to the moral complexities raised by robots and other autonomous machines much longer. As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers. We’re going to have to figure out how to give machines moral codes even if it’s not something we want to think about.
Please click on through to read the rest:
Nicholas Carr’s ‘Glass Cage': Automation Will Hurt Society in Long Run
