The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (38 page)

43.
Matt Richtel, “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute,”
New York Times
, October 23, 2011.

Interlude, with Grave Robber

1.
Peter Merholz, “ ‘Frictionless’ as an Alternative to ‘Simplicity’ in Design,”
Adaptive Path
(blog), July 21, 2010, adaptivepath.com/ideas/friction-as-an-alternative-to-simplicity-in-design.

2.
David J. Hill, “Exclusive Interview with Ray Kurzweil on Future AI Project at Google,”
SingularityHUB
, January 10, 2013, singularityhub.com/2013/01/10/exclusive-interview-with-ray-kurzweil-on-future-ai-project-at-google/.

Chapter Eight: YOUR INNER DRONE

1.
Asimov’s Rules of Robotics—“the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot’s positronic brain”—first appeared in his 1942 short story “Runaround,” which can be found in the collection
I, Robot
(New York: Bantam, 2004), 37.

2.
Gary Marcus, “Moral Machines,”
News Desk
(blog),
New Yorker
, November 27, 2012, newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/google-driverless-car-morality.html.

3.
Charles T. Rubin, “Machine Morality and Human Responsibility,”
New Atlantis
, Summer 2011.

4.
Christof Heyns, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions,” presentation to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly, April 9, 2013, www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session23/A-HRC-23-47_en.pdf.

5.
Patrick Lin et al., “Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design,” version 1.0.9, prepared for U.S. Department of Navy, Office of Naval Research, December 20, 2008.

6.
Ibid.

7.
Thomas K. Adams, “Future Warfare and the Decline of Human Decisionmaking,”
Parameters
, Winter 2001–2002.

8.
Heyns, “Report of the Special Rapporteur.”

9.
Ibid.

10.
Joseph Weizenbaum,
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation
(New York: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 20.

11.
Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,”
Scientific American
, September 1991.

12.
Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, “The Coming Age of Calm Technology,” in P. J. Denning and R. M. Metcalfe, eds.,
Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing
(New York: Springer, 1997), 75–86.

13.
M. Weiser et al., “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing Research at PARC in the Late 1980s,”
IBM Systems Journal
38, no. 4 (1999): 693–696.

14.
See Nicholas Carr,
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

15.
Thomas P. Hughes,
Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 140.

16.
W. Brian Arthur, “The Second Economy,”
McKinsey Quarterly
, October 2011.

17.
Ibid.

18.
Bill Gates,
Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System
(New York: Warner Books, 1999), 37.

19.
Arthur C. Clarke,
Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 227.

20.
Sergey Brin, “Why Google Glass?,” speech at TED2013, Long Beach, Calif., February 27, 2013, youtube.com/watch?v=rie-hPVJ7Sw.

21.
Ibid.

22.
See Christopher D. Wickens and Amy L. Alexander, “Attentional Tunneling and Task Management in Synthetic Vision Displays,”
International Journal of Aviation Psychology
19, no. 2 (2009): 182–199.

23.
Richard F. Haines, “A Breakdown in Simultaneous Information Processing,” in Gerard Obrecht and Lawrence W. Stark, eds.,
Presbyopia Research: From Molecular Biology to Visual Adaptation
(New York: Plenum Press, 1991), 171–176.

24.
Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chambris, “Is Google Glass Dangerous?,”
New York Times
, May 26, 2013.

25.
“Amanda Rosenberg: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin’s New Girlfriend?,”
Guardian,
August 30, 2013, theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/aug/30/amanda-rosenberg-google-sergey-brin-girlfriend.

26.
Weiser, “Computer for the 21st Century.”

27.
Interview with Charlie Rose,
Charlie Rose
, April 24, 2012, charlierose.com/watch/60065884.

28.
David Kirkpatrick,
The Facebook Effect
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 10.

29.
Josh Constine, “Google Unites Gmail and G+ Chat into ‘Hangouts’ Cross-Platform Text and Group Video Messaging App,”
TechCrunch
, May 15, 2013, techcrunch.com/2013/05/15/google-hangouts-messaging-app/.

30.
Larry Greenemeier, “Chipmaker Races to Save Stephen Hawking’s Speech as His Condition Deteriorates,”
Scientific American
, January 18, 2013, www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=intel-helps-hawking-communicate.

31.
Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Next Step for Technology Is Becoming the Background,”
New York Times
, July 1, 2012, bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/google’s-project-glass-lets-technology-slip-into-the-background/.

32.
Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,”
Theory, Culture and Society
19 (2002): 247–260. The emphasis is Latour’s.

33.
Bernhard Seefeld, “Meet the New Google Maps: A Map for Every Person and Place,”
Google Lat Long
(blog), May 15, 2013, google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/05/meet-new-google-maps-map-for-every.html.

34.
Evgeny Morozov, “My Map or Yours?,”
Slate
, May 28, 2013, slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/05/google_maps_personalization_will_hurt_public_space_and_engagement.html.

35.
Kirkpatrick,
Facebook Effect
, 199.

36.
Sebastian Thrun, “Google’s Driverless Car,” speech at TED2011, March 2011, ted.com/talks/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car.html.

37.
National Safety Council, “Annual Estimate of Cell Phone Crashes 2012,” white paper, 2014.

38.
See Sigfried Giedion,
Mechanization Takes Command
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 628–712.

39.
Langdon Winner,
Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 285.

Chapter Nine: THE LOVE THAT LAYS THE SWALE IN ROWS

1.
Quoted in Richard Poirier,
Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 30. Details about Frost’s life are drawn from Poirier’s book; William H. Pritchard,
Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Jay Parini,
Robert Frost: A Life
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999).

2.
Quoted in Poirier,
Robert Frost
, 30.

3.
Robert Frost, “Mowing,” in
A Boy’s Will
(New York: Henry Holt, 1915), 36.

4.
Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” in
A Further Range
(New York: Henry Holt, 1936), 16–18.

5.
Poirier,
Robert Frost
, 278.

6.
Robert Frost, “Some Science Fiction,” in
In the Clearing
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962), 89–90.

7.
Poirier,
Robert Frost
, 301.

8.
Robert Frost, “Kitty Hawk,” in
In the Clearing
, 41–58.

9.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
(London: Routledge, 2012), 147. My reading of Merleau-Ponty draws on Hubert L. Dreyfus’s commentary “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment,”
Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy
4 (Spring 1996), ejap.louisiana.edu/ejap/1996.spring/dreyfus.1996.spring.html.

10.
Benedict de Spinoza,
Ethics
(London: Penguin, 1996), 44.

11.
John Edward Huth, “Losing Our Way in the World,”
New York Times
, July 21, 2013. See also Huth’s enlightening book
The Lost Art of Finding Our Way
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).

12.
Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
, 148.

13.
Ibid., 261.

14.
See Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

15.
Pascal Ravassard et al., “Multisensory Control of Hippocampal Spatiotemporal Selectivity,”
Science
340, no. 6138 (2013): 1342–1346.

16.
Anonymous, “Living in
The Matrix
Requires Less Brain Power,”
Science Now
, May 2, 2013, news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013/05/living-matrix-requires-less-brain-power.

17.
Alfred Korzybski,
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
, 5th ed. (New York: Institute of General Semantics, 1994), 58.

18.
John Dewey,
Art as Experience
(New York: Perigee Books, 1980), 59.

19.
Medco, “America’s State of Mind,” 2011, apps.who.int/medicinedocs/documents/s19032en/s19032en.pdf.

20.
Erin M. Sullivan et al., “Suicide among Adults Aged 35–64 Years—United States, 1999–2010,”
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
, May 3, 2013.

21.
Alan Schwarz and Sarah Cohen, “A.D.H.D. Seen in 11% of U.S. Children as Diagnoses Rise,”
New York Times
, April 1, 2013.

22.
Robert Frost, “The Tuft of Flowers,” in
A Boy’s Will
, 47–49.

23.
See Anonymous, “Fields of Automation,”
Economist
, December 10, 2009; and Ian Berry, “Teaching Drones to Farm,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 20, 2011.

24.
Charles A. Lindbergh,
The Spirit of St. Louis
(New York: Scribner, 2003), 486. The emphasis is Lindbergh’s.

25.
J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,”
IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics
1 (March 1960): 4–11.

26.
Langdon Winner,
Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 20–21.

27.
Aristotle,
The Politics
, in Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds.,
Princeton Readings in Political Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 110–111.

28.
Evgeny Morozov,
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 323.

29.
Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,”
Wired
, January 2013.

30.
Kevin Drum, “Welcome, Robot Overloads. Please Don’t Fire Us?,”
Mother Jones
, May/June 2013.

31.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
The Communist Manifesto
(New York: Verso, 1998), 43.

32.
Anonymous, “Slaves to the Smartphone,”
Economist
, March 10, 2012.

33.
Kevin Kelly, “What Technology Wants,”
Cool Tools
, October 18, 2010, kk.org/cooltools/archives/4749.

34.
George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,”
New Yorker
, November 28, 2011.

35.
Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4–5.

36.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(New York: Harper, 1991), 80.

37.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in
Essays and Lectures
(New York: Library of America, 1983), 57.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The epigraph to this book is the concluding stanza of William Carlos Williams’s poem “To Elsie,” which appeared in the 1923 volume
Spring and All
.

I am deeply grateful to those who, as interviewees, reviewers, or correspondents, provided me with insight and assistance: Claudio Aporta, Henry Beer, Véronique Bohbot, George Dyson, Gerhard Fischer, Mark Gross, Katherine Hayles, Charles Jacobs, Joan Lowy, E. J. Meade, Raja Parasuraman, Lawrence Port, Jeff Robbins, Jeffrey Rowe, Ari Schulman, Evan Selinger, Betsy Sparrow, Tim Swan, Ben Tranel, and Christof van Nimwegen.

The Glass Cage
is the third of my books to have been guided by the editorial hand of Brendan Curry at W. W. Norton. I thank Brendan and his colleagues for their work on my behalf. I am indebted as well to my agent, John Brockman, and his associates at Brockman Inc. for their wise counsel and support.

Some passages in this book appeared earlier, in different forms, in the
Atlantic
, the
Washington Post
,
MIT Technology Review
, and my blog, Rough Type.