The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (33 page)

There’s a callousness to such grandiose futurism. As history reminds us, high-flown rhetoric about using technology to liberate workers often masks a contempt for labor. It strains credulity to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast wealth-redistribution scheme that would be necessary to fund the self-actualizing leisure-time pursuits of the jobless multitudes. Even if society were to come up with some magic spell, or magic algorithm, for equitably parceling out the spoils of automation, there’s good reason to doubt whether anything resembling the “economic bliss” imagined by Keynes would ensue. In a prescient passage in
The Human Condition
, Hannah Arendt observed that if automation’s utopian promise were actually to pan out, the result would probably feel less like paradise than like a cruel practical joke. The whole of modern society, she wrote, has been organized as “a laboring society,” where working for pay, and then spending that pay, is the way people define themselves and measure their worth. Most of the “higher and more meaningful activities” revered in the distant past have been pushed to the margin or forgotten, and “only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living.” For technology to fulfill humankind’s abiding “wish to be liberated from labor’s ‘toil and trouble’ ” at this point would be perverse. It would cast us deeper into a purgatory of malaise. What automation confronts us with, Arendt concluded, “is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.”
³⁵
Utopianism, she understood, is a form of miswanting.

The social and economic problems caused or exacerbated by automation aren’t going to be solved by throwing more software at them. Our inanimate slaves aren’t going to chauffeur us to a utopia of comfort and harmony. If the problems are to be solved, or at least attenuated, the public will need to grapple with them in their full complexity. To ensure society’s well-being in the future, we may need to place limits on automation. We may have to shift our view of progress, putting the emphasis on social and personal flourishing rather than technological advancement. We may even have to entertain an idea that’s come to be considered unthinkable, at least in business circles: giving people precedence over machines.

I
N 1986,
a Canadian ethnographer named Richard Kool wrote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a letter. Kool had read some of the professor’s early work about flow, and he had been reminded of his own research into the Shushwap tribe, an aboriginal people who lived in the Thompson River Valley in what is now British Columbia. The Shushwap territory was “a plentiful land,” Kool noted. It was blessed with an abundance of fish and game and edible roots and berries. The Shushwaps did not have to wander to survive. They built villages and developed “elaborate technologies for very effectively using the resources in the environment.” They viewed their lives as good and rich. But the tribe’s elders saw that in such comfortable circumstances lay danger. “The world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning.” And so, every thirty years or so, the Shushwaps, led by their elders, would uproot themselves. They’d leave their homes, abandon their villages, and head off into the wilds. “The entire population,” Kool reported, “would move to a different part of the Shushwap land.” And there they would discover a fresh set of challenges. “There were new streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsam root would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and happy.”
³⁶

E. J. M
EADE
, the Colorado architect, said something revealing when I talked to him about his firm’s adoption of computer-aided design systems. The hard part wasn’t learning how to use the software. That was pretty easy. What was tough was learning how
not
to use it. The speed, ease, and sheer novelty of CAD made it enticing. The first instinct of the firm’s designers was to plop themselves down at their computers at the start of a project. But when they took a hard look at their work, they realized that the software was a hindrance to creativity. It was closing off aesthetic and functional possibilities even as it was quickening the pace of production. As Meade and his colleagues thought more critically about the effects of automation, they began to resist the technology’s temptations. They found themselves “bringing the computer in later and later” in the course of a project. For the early, formative stages of the work, they returned to their sketchbooks and sheets of tracing paper, their models of cardboard and foam core. “At the back end, it’s brilliant,” Meade said in summing up what he’s learned about CAD. “The convenience factor is great.” But the computer’s “expedience” can be perilous. For the unwary and the uncritical, it can overwhelm other, more important considerations. “You have to dig deep into the tool to avoid being manipulated by it.”

A year or so before I talked to Meade—just as I was beginning the research for this book—I had a chance meeting on a college campus with a freelance photographer who was working on an assignment for the school. He was standing idly under a tree, waiting for some uncooperative clouds to get out of the way of the sun. I noticed he had a large-format film camera set up on a bulky tripod—it was hard to miss, as it looked almost absurdly old-fashioned—and I asked him why he was still using film. He told me that he had eagerly embraced digital photography a few years earlier. He had replaced his film cameras and his darkroom with digital cameras and a computer running the latest image-processing software. But after a few months, he switched back. It wasn’t that he was dissatisfied with the operation of the equipment or the resolution or accuracy of the images. It was that the way he went about his work had changed, and not for the better.

The constraints inherent in taking and developing pictures on film—the expense, the toil, the uncertainty—had encouraged him to work slowly when he was on a shoot, with deliberation, thoughtfulness, and a deep, physical sense of presence. Before he took a picture, he would compose the shot meticulously in his mind, attending to the scene’s light, color, framing, and form. He would wait patiently for the right moment to release the shutter. With a digital camera, he could work faster. He could take a slew of images, one after the other, and then use his computer to sort through them and crop and tweak the most promising ones. The act of composition took place after a photo was taken. The change felt intoxicating at first. But he found himself disappointed with the results. The images left him cold. Film, he realized, imposed a discipline of perception, of seeing, which led to richer, more artful, more moving photographs. Film demanded more of him. And so he went back to the older technology.

Neither the architect nor the photographer was the least bit antagonistic toward computers. Neither was motivated by abstract concerns about a loss of agency or autonomy. Neither was a crusader. Both just wanted the best tool for the job—the tool that would encourage and enable them to do their finest, most fulfilling work. What they came to realize was that the newest, most automated, most expedient tool is not always the best choice. Although I’m sure they would bristle at being likened to the Luddites, their decision to forgo the latest technology, at least in some stages of their work, was an act of rebellion resembling that of the old English machine-breakers, if without the fury and the violence. Like the Luddites, they understood that decisions about technology are also decisions about ways of working and ways of living—and they took control of those decisions rather than ceding them to others or giving way to the momentum of progress. They stepped back and thought critically about technology.

As a society, we’ve become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we’ve turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.

Technology has always challenged people to think about what’s important in their lives, to ask themselves, as I suggested at the outset of this book, what
human being
means. Automation, as it extends its reach into the most intimate spheres of our existence, raises the stakes. We can allow ourselves to be carried along by the technological current, wherever it may be taking us, or we can push against it. To resist invention is not to reject invention. It’s to humble invention, to bring progress down to earth. “Resistance is futile,” goes the glib
Star Trek
cliché beloved by techies. But that’s the opposite of the truth. Resistance is never futile. If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, “the active soul,”
³⁷
then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the soul.

One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a challenge, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but, as Frost saw, it’s the work—the means—that makes us who we are. Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face the same existential question that the Shushwap confronted: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?

That sounds very serious. But the aim is joy. The active soul is a light soul. By reclaiming our tools as parts of ourselves, as instruments of experience rather than just means of production, we can enjoy the freedom that congenial technology provides when it opens the world more fully to us. It’s the freedom I imagine Lawrence Sperry and Emil Cachin must have felt on that bright spring day in Paris a hundred years ago when they climbed out onto the wings of their gyroscope-balanced Curtiss C-2 biplane and, filled with terror and delight, passed over the reviewing stands and saw below them the faces of the crowd turned skyward in awe.

*
The destructive potential of the scythe gains even greater symbolic resonance when one remembers that the orchise, a tuberous plant, derives its name from the Greek word for testicle,
orkhis
. Frost was well versed in classical languages and literature. He would also have been familiar with the popular image of the Grim Reaper and his scythe.

NOTES

Introduction: ALERT FOR OPERATORS

1.
Federal Aviation Administration, SAFO 13002, January 4, 2013, faa.gov/other_visit/aviation_industry/airline_operators/airline_safety/safo/all_safos/media/2013/SAFO13002.pdf.

Chapter One: PASSENGERS

1.
Sebastian Thrun, “What We’re Driving At,”
Google Official Blog
, October 9, 2010, googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html. See also Tom Vanderbilt, “Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here,”
Wired
, February 2012.

2.
Daniel DeBolt, “Google’s Self-Driving Car in Five-Car Crash,”
Mountain View Voice
, August 8, 2011.

3.
Richard Waters and Henry Foy, “Tesla Moves Ahead of Google in Race to Build Self-Driving Cars,”
Financial Times
, September 17, 2013, ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/70d26288-1faf-11e3-8861-00144feab7de.html.