The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (3 page)

T
HE TROUBLE
with automation is that it often gives us what we don’t need at the cost of what we do. To understand why that’s so, and why we’re eager to accept the bargain, we need to take a look at how certain cognitive biases—flaws in the way we think—can distort our perceptions. When it comes to assessing the value of labor and leisure, the mind’s eye can’t see straight.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor and author of the popular 1990 book
Flow
, has described a phenomenon that he calls “the paradox of work.” He first observed it in a study he conducted in the 1980s with his University of Chicago colleague Judith LeFevre. They recruited a hundred workers, blue-collar and white-collar, skilled and unskilled, from five businesses around Chicago. They gave each an electronic pager (this was when cell phones were still luxury goods) that they had programmed to beep at seven random moments a day over the course of a week. At each beep, the subjects would fill out a short questionnaire. They’d describe the activity they were engaged in at that moment, the challenges they were facing, the skills they were deploying, and the psychological state they were in, as indicated by their sense of motivation, satisfaction, engagement, creativity, and so forth. The intent of this “experience sampling,” as Csikszentmihalyi termed the technique, was to see how people spend their time, on the job and off, and how their activities influence their “quality of experience.”

The results were surprising. People were happier, felt more fulfilled by what they were doing, while they were at work than during their leisure hours. In their free time, they tended to feel bored and anxious. And yet they didn’t like to be at work. When they were on the job, they expressed a strong desire to be off the job, and when they were off the job, the last thing they wanted was to go back to work. “We have,” reported Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, “the paradoxical situation of people having many more positive feelings at work than in leisure, yet saying that they ‘wish to be doing something else’ when they are at work, not when they are in leisure.”
⁷
We’re terrible, the experiment revealed, at anticipating which activities will satisfy us and which will leave us discontented. Even when we’re in the midst of doing something, we don’t seem able to judge its psychic consequences accurately.

Those are symptoms of a more general affliction, on which psychologists have bestowed the poetic name
miswanting
. We’re inclined to desire things we don’t like and to like things we don’t desire. “When the things we want to happen do not improve our happiness, and when the things we want not to happen do,” the cognitive psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson have observed, “it seems fair to say we have wanted badly.”
⁸
And as slews of gloomy studies show, we’re forever wanting badly. There’s also a social angle to our tendency to misjudge work and leisure. As Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre discovered in their experiments, and as most of us know from our own experience, people allow themselves to be guided by social conventions—in this case, the deep-seated idea that being “at leisure” is more desirable, and carries more status, than being “at work”—rather than by their true feelings. “Needless to say,” the researchers concluded, “such a blindness to the real state of affairs is likely to have unfortunate consequences for both individual well-being and the health of society.” As people act on their skewed perceptions, they will “try to do more of those activities that provide the least positive experiences and avoid the activities that are the source of their most positive and intense feelings.”
⁹
That’s hardly a recipe for the good life.

It’s not that the work we do for pay is intrinsically superior to the activities we engage in for diversion or entertainment. Far from it. Plenty of jobs are dull and even demeaning, and plenty of hobbies and pastimes are stimulating and fulfilling. But a job imposes a structure on our time that we lose when we’re left to our own devices. At work, we’re pushed to engage in the kinds of activities that human beings find most satisfying. We’re happiest when we’re absorbed in a difficult task, a task that has clear goals and that challenges us not only to exercise our talents but to stretch them. We become so immersed in the flow of our work, to use Csikszentmihalyi’s term, that we tune out distractions and transcend the anxieties and worries that plague our everyday lives. Our usually wayward attention becomes fixed on what we’re doing. “Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one,” explains Csikszentmihalyi. “Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
¹⁰
Such states of deep absorption can be produced by all manner of effort, from laying tile to singing in a choir to racing a dirt bike. You don’t have to be earning a wage to enjoy the transports of flow.

More often than not, though, our discipline flags and our mind wanders when we’re not on the job. We may yearn for the workday to be over so we can start spending our pay and having some fun, but most of us fritter away our leisure hours. We shun hard work and only rarely engage in challenging hobbies. Instead, we watch TV or go to the mall or log on to Facebook. We get lazy. And then we get bored and fretful. Disengaged from any outward focus, our attention turns inward, and we end up locked in what Emerson called the jail of self-consciousness. Jobs, even crummy ones, are “actually easier to enjoy than free time,” says Csikszentmihalyi, because they have the “built-in” goals and challenges that “encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it.”
¹¹
But that’s not what our deceiving minds want us to believe. Given the opportunity, we’ll eagerly relieve ourselves of 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.

THE ROBOT AT THE GATE

I
N THE EARLY 1950S
, Leslie Illingworth, a much-admired political cartoonist at the British satirical magazine
Punch
, drew a dark and foreboding sketch. Set at dusk on what appears to be a stormy autumn day, it shows a worker peering anxiously from the doorway of an anonymous manufacturing plant. One of his hands grips a small tool; the other is balled into a fist. He looks out across the muddy factory yard to the plant’s main gate. There, standing beside a sign reading “Hands Wanted,” looms a giant, broad-shouldered robot. Across its chest, emblazoned in block letters, is the word “Automation.”

The illustration was a sign of its times, a reflection of a new anxiety seeping through Western society. In 1956, it was reprinted as the frontispiece of a slender but influential book called
Automation: Friend or Foe?
by Robert Hugh Macmillan, an engineering professor at Cambridge University. On the first page, Macmillan posed an unsettling question: “Are we in danger of being destroyed by our own creations?” He was not, he explained, referring to the well-known “perils of unrestricted ‘push-button’ warfare.” He was talking about a less discussed but more insidious threat: “the rapidly increasing part that automatic devices are playing in the peace-time industrial life of all civilized countries.”
¹
Just as earlier machines “had replaced man’s muscles,” these new devices seemed likely to “replace his brains.” By taking over many good, well-paying jobs, they threatened to create widespread unemployment, leading to social strife and upheaval—of just the sort Karl Marx had foreseen a century earlier.
²

But, Macmillan continued, it didn’t have to be that way. If “
rightly
applied,” automation could bring economic stability, spread prosperity, and relieve the human race of its toils. “My hope is that this new branch of technology may eventually enable us to lift the curse of Adam from the shoulders of man, for machines could indeed become men’s slaves rather than their masters, now that practical techniques have been devised for controlling them automatically.”
³
Whether technologies of automation ultimately proved boon or bane, Macmillan warned, one thing was certain: they would play an ever greater role in industry and society. The economic imperatives of “a highly competitive world” made that inevitable.
⁴
If a robot could work faster, cheaper, or better than its human counterpart, the robot would get the job.