The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (36 page)

7.
Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin et al., “The Benefits of Health Information Technology: A Review of the Recent Literature Shows Predominantly Positive Results,”
Health Affairs
30, no. 3 (2011): 464–471.

8.
Dean F. Sittig et al., “Lessons from ‘Unexpected Increased Mortality after Implementation of a Commercially Sold Computerized Physician Order Entry System,’ ”
Pediatrics
118, no. 2 (August 1, 2006): 797–801.

9.
Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, “Obama’s $80 Billion Exaggeration,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 12, 2009. See also, by the same authors, “Off the Record—Avoiding the Pitfalls of Going Electronic,”
New England Journal of Medicine
358, no. 16 (2008): 1656–1658.

10.
See Fred Schulte, “Growth of Electronic Medical Records Eases Path to Inflated Bills,” Center for Public Integrity, September 19, 2012, publicintegrity.org/2012/09/19/10812/growth-electronic-medical-records-eases-path-inflated-bills; and Reed Abelson et al., “Medicare Bills Rise as Records Turn Electronic,”
New York Times
, September 22, 2012.

11.
Daniel R. Levinson,
CMS and Its Contractors Have Adopted Few Program Integrity Practices to Address Vulnerabilities in EHRs
(Washington, D.C.: Office of the Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services, January 2014), oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-01-11-00571.pdf.

12.
Danny McCormick et al., “Giving Office-Based Physicians Electronic Access to Patients’ Prior Imaging and Lab Results Did Not Deter Ordering of Tests,”
Health Affairs
31, no. 3 (2012): 488–496. An earlier study tracked the treatment of diabetes patients over five years at two clinics, one that had installed an electronic medical record system and one that hadn’t. It found that physicians at the clinic with the EMR system ordered more tests but did not achieve better glycemic control in their patients. “The data suggest that despite the substantial cost and increasing technical sophistication of EMRs, EMR use failed to achieve desirable levels of clinical improvement,” wrote the researchers. Patrick J. O’Connor et al., “Impact of an Electronic Medical Record on Diabetes Quality of Care,”
Annals of Family Medicine
3, no. 4 (July 2005): 300–306.

13.
Timothy Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation among Primary Care Physicians Using Two Work Innovations,”
Health Care Management Review
36, no. 4 (2011): 338–348.

14.
Schulte, “Growth of Electronic Medical Records.”

15.
Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation.”

16.
Danielle Ofri, “The Doctor vs. the Computer,”
New York Times
, December 30, 2010.

17.
Thomas H. Payne et al., “Transition from Paper to Electronic Inpatient Physician Notes,”
Journal of the American Medical Information Association
17 (2010): 108–111.

18.
Ofri, “Doctor vs. the Computer.”

19.
Beth Lown and Dayron Rodriguez, “Lost in Translation? How Electronic Health Records Structure Communication, Relationships, and Meaning,”
Academic Medicine
87, no. 4 (2012): 392–394.

20.
Emran Rouf et al., “Computers in the Exam Room: Differences in Physician-Patient Interaction May Be Due to Physician Experience,”
Journal of General Internal Medicine
22, no. 1 (2007): 43–48.

21.
Avik Shachak et al., “Primary Care Physicians’ Use of an Electronic Medical Record System: A Cognitive Task Analysis,”
Journal of General Internal Medicine
24, no. 3 (2009): 341–348.

22.
Lown and Rodriguez, “Lost in Translation?”

23.
See Saul N. Weingart et al., “Physicians’ Decisions to Override Computerized Drug Alerts in Primary Care,”
Archives of Internal Medicine
163 (November 24, 2003): 2625–2631; Alissa L. Russ et al., “Prescribers’ Interactions with Medication Alerts at the Point of Prescribing: A Multi-method,
In Situ
Investigation of the Human–Computer Interaction,”
International Journal of Medical Informatics
81 (2012): 232–243; M. Susan Ridgely and Michael D. Greenberg, “Too Many Alerts, Too Much Liability: Sorting through the Malpractice Implications of Drug-Drug Interaction Clinical Decision Support,”
Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law and Policy
5 (2012): 257–295; and David W. Bates, “Clinical Decision Support and the Law: The Big Picture,”
Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law and Policy
5 (2012): 319–324.

24.
Atul Gawande,
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
(New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 161–162.

25.
Lown and Rodriguez, “Lost in Translation?”

26.
Jerome Groopman,
How Doctors Think
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 34–35.

27.
Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations
(New York: Modern Library, 2000), 840.

28.
Ibid., 4.

29.
Frederick Winslow Taylor,
The Principles of Scientific Management
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913), 11.

30.
Ibid., 36.

31.
Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 147.

32.
Harry Braverman,
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 307.

33.
For a succinct review of the Braverman debate, see Peter Meiksins, “Labor and Monopoly Capital for the 1990s: A Review and Critique of the Labor Process Debate,”
Monthly Review
, November 1994.

34.
James R. Bright,
Automation and Management
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1958), 176–195.

35.
Ibid., 188.

36.
James R. Bright, “The Relationship of Increasing Automation and Skill Requirements,” in National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress,
Technology and the American Economy, Appendix II: The Employment Impact of Technological Change
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 201–221.

37.
George Dyson, comment on Edge.org, July 11, 2008, edge.org/discourse/carr_google.html#dysong.

38.
For a lucid explanation of machine learning, see the sixth chapter of John MacCormick’s
Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

39.
Max Raskin and Ilan Kolet, “Wall Street Jobs Plunge as Profits Soar,” Bloomberg News, April 23, 2013, bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-24/wall-street-jobs-plunge-as-profits-soar-chart-of-the-day.html.

40.
Ashwin Parameswaran, “Explaining the Neglect of Doug Engelbart’s Vision: The Economic Irrelevance of Human Intelligence Augmentation,”
Macroresilience
, July 8, 2013, macroresilience.com/2013/07/08/explaining-the-neglect-of-doug-engelbarts-vision/.

41.
See Daniel Martin Katz, “Quantitative Legal Prediction—or—How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data-Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry,”
Emory Law Journal
62, no. 4 (2013): 909–966.

42.
Joseph Walker, “Meet the New Boss: Big Data,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 20, 2012.

43.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi,
The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Automation
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 96.

44.
A. M. Turing, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,”
Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society
45, no. 2239 (1939): 161–228.

45.
Ibid.

46.
Hector J. Levesque, “On Our Best Behaviour,” lecture delivered at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China, August 8, 2013.

47.
See Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
(New York: Random House, 2012), 416–419.

48.
Donald T. Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,”
Occasional Paper Series
, no. 8 (December 1976), Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.

49.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier,
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 166.

50.
Kate Crawford, “The Hidden Biases in Big Data,”
HBR Blog Network
, April 1, 2013, hbr.org/cs/2013/04/the_hidden_biases_in_big_data.html.

51.
In a 1968 article, Weed wrote, “If useful historical data can be acquired and stored cheaply, completely and accurately by new computers and interviewing technics without the use of expensive physician time, they should be seriously considered.” Lawrence L. Weed, “Medical Records That Guide and Teach,”
New England Journal of Medicine
278 (1968): 593–600, 652–657.

52.
Lee Jacobs, “Interview with Lawrence Weed, MD—The Father of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record Looks Ahead,”
Permanente Journal
13, no. 3 (2009): 84–89.

53.
Gary Klein, “Evidence-Based Medicine,”
Edge
, January 14, 2014, edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement.

54.
Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,”
Cambridge Journal
1 (1947): 81–98, 145–157. The essay was collected in Oakeshott’s 1962 book
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays
(New York: Basic Books).

Chapter Six: WORLD AND SCREEN

1.
William Edward Parry,
Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific
(London: John Murray, 1824), 277.

2.
Claudio Aporta and Eric Higgs, “Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology,”
Current Anthropology
46, no. 5 (2005): 729–753.

3.
Interview of Claudio Aporta by author, January 25, 2012.

4.
Gilly Leshed et al., “In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment,” in
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(New York: ACM, 2008), 1675–1684.

5.
David Brooks, “The Outsourced Brain,”
New York Times
, October 26, 2007.

6.
Julia Frankenstein et al., “Is the Map in Our Head Oriented North?,”
Psychological Science
23, no. 2 (2012): 120–125.

7.
Julia Frankenstein, “Is GPS All in Our Heads?,”
New York Times
, February 2, 2012.

8.
Gary E. Burnett and Kate Lee, “The Effect of Vehicle Navigation Systems on the Formation of Cognitive Maps,” in Geoffrey Underwood, ed.,
Traffic and Transport Psychology: Theory and Application
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 407–418.

9.
Elliot P. Fenech et al., “The Effects of Acoustic Turn-by-Turn Navigation on Wayfinding,”
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
54, no. 23 (2010): 1926–1930.

10.
Toru Ishikawa et al., “Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience,”
Journal of Environmental Psychology
28, no. 1 (2008): 74–82; and Stefan Münzer et al., “Computer-Assisted Navigation and the Acquisition of Route and Survey Knowledge,”
Journal of Environmental Psychology
26, no. 4 (2006): 300–308.

11.
Sara Hendren, “The White Cane as Technology,”
Atlantic
, November 6, 2013, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-white-cane-as-technology/281167/.

12.
Tim Ingold,
Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description
(London: Routledge, 2011), 149–152. The emphasis is Ingold’s.

13.
Quoted in James Fallows, “The Places You’ll Go,”
Atlantic
, January/February 2013.

14.
Ari N. Schulman, “GPS and the End of the Road,”
New Atlantis
, Spring 2011.

15.
John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky, “The Hippocampus as a Spatial Map: Preliminary Evidence from Unit Activity in the Freely-Moving Rat,”
Brain Research
34 (1971): 171–175.

16.
John O’Keefe, “A Review of the Hippocampal Place Cells,”
Progress in Neurobiology
13, no. 4 (2009): 419–439.

17.
Edvard I. Moser et al., “Place Cells, Grid Cells, and the Brain’s Spatial Representation System,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience
31 (2008): 69–89.

18.
See Christian F. Doeller et al., “Evidence for Grid Cells in a Human Memory Network,”
Nature
463 (2010): 657–661; Nathaniel J. Killian et al., “A Map of Visual Space in the Primate Entorhinal Cortex,”
Nature
491 (2012): 761–764; and Joshua Jacobs et al., “Direct Recordings of Grid-Like Neuronal Activity in Human Spatial Navigation,”
Nature Neuroscience,
August 4, 2013, nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3466.html.

19.
James Gorman, “A Sense of Where You Are,”
New York Times
, April 30, 2013.

20.
György Buzsáki and Edvard I. Moser, “Memory, Navigation and Theta Rhythm in the Hippocampal-Entorhinal System,”
Nature Neuroscience
16, no. 2 (2013): 130–138. See also Neil Burgess et al., “Memory for Events and Their Spatial Context: Models and Experiments,” in Alan Baddeley et al., eds.,
Episodic Memory: New Directions in Research
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 249–268. It seems revealing that one of the most powerful mnemonic devices, dating back to classical times, involves setting mental pictures of items or facts in locations in an imaginary place, such as a building or a town. Memories become easier to recall when they’re associated with physical locations, even if only in the imagination.