Is Technology Really Making Us Stupid?

In his new book The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr argues that as machines grow smarter, people have fewer and fewer chances to sharpen their own skills. We don't entirely agree.

"I took out almost all my savings and bought one of Apple's first Macintosh computers. I set it on my desk, plugged in the keyboard and mouse, and flipped the power switch. As it booted up and ran the mysterious routines that woke it, it smiled at me and played a pleasant chime of welcome. I was hooked at once."

That is how Nicholas Carr, a 56-year-old technology writer, remembers his first encounter with a personal computer as a young man.

"My first reaction was, wow, this is so cool!" When QDaily asked him about that moment, his gaze drifted away. "I still remember it today. In my twenties, I was deeply in love with computers and technology," he said.

Carr, a longtime observer of the tech industry, was among the first to point out the importance of cloud computing, but his best-known work is The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for general nonfiction, Carr's main argument is that our dependence on the internet has cost us the ability to think deeply. Concentrating had become so hard that he told his friends: "I found that I was becoming stupid."

Readers of The Shallows tend to react in very different ways. Some think it lays bare the true relationship between new technology and people; others brush it off, believing he exaggerates the danger. We suspect the second group is mostly younger readers who, unlike Carr, grew up with mobile phones and personal computers (though not everyone like that disagrees with him).

When Carr wrote The Shallows, social networks and instant messaging were not yet everywhere as they are today. Facebook and Twitter had only just started, and WeChat and Snapchat did not yet exist. What made Carr "stupid" was the search engine, and email, which many people now consider better than WeChat for deep conversation.

Things today are surely more complicated than what he faced back then, so he followed up with a new book, The Glass Cage. He seems not to have changed his mind; he remains wary of technology.

Arguing with Carr over whether technology really makes us stupid does not look easy. Still, some lines in The Shallows are quite interesting, for example: "Technological progress does not mean we have a 'better brain'; it just means we have a different brain." And: "Human civilization is not the sum of 'all the world's information'; each generation has to rebuild civilization."

In the years after The Shallows, Carr kept studying the relationship between people and computers. But the landscape changed faster than anyone expected. Smartphones spread quickly, and people handed more of their thinking to them; take the phone away, and people soon lose common sense they once had, even the ability to notice simple things around them.

A simple example: GPS finds our way for us, and calculators strip us of arithmetic. But we also know that foreigners basically cannot do mental arithmetic, while many Chinese people can: our minds turn fast and a number comes out in an instant. True, different kinds of education have made Chinese people and foreigners different.

But none of these differences is decisive. In fact, they only make the two groups different. The same holds if we turn to "the relationship between machines, people of the past and people of today": we believe humans have not become stupid; they have only become different from what they used to be.

What do you think?

As technology advances, Carr holds his ground: handing memory and logic over to computers is really not a good idea

Carr says: "I can see signs that we are actually very, very eager to hand our natural talents over to smartphones. We have become so dependent on them that we can no longer do on our own things we used to do without a phone."

Computers take on more and more of our tasks at home and at work, guiding us through all 24 hours of the day. They are so ubiquitous that we no longer notice them. Only when you deliberately cut yourself off from smart devices do you see how absurd life has become.

A photographer shot a series of photos titled Removed, then edited the phones out in post-production

"People will say, I don't need to learn this, I don't need to remember that, because I can Google it, I can use a search engine to find whatever I need," Carr says. "That's why I say Google is making us stupid. The missing link is that only by learning and remembering can you create knowledge of your own. You integrate that information into conceptual knowledge, and only then can you think critically."

It is like learning math with a calculator from day one, which is not necessarily a good thing. A student who has already mastered the math saves time on repetitive pen-and-paper calculation. But a student who skips the basics because a calculator exists may struggle to move on to more complex mathematics.

"If you rely on a computer to do something you haven't learned to do yourself, it becomes an obstacle to deep thinking. You grow more and more dependent on the computer, even addicted to it," Carr says.

Why is losing the ability to think deeply so frightening? A brain that goes a long time without using functions such as navigation risks a weakened hippocampus, and some scholars even predict that over the next 20 years, Alzheimer's disease will strike at ever younger ages.

Smart devices keep more and more people living in dependence without realizing it. We rely on apps to get around, on search engines to find information, on restaurant-review communities to decide whether a place is worth a visit. People wrongly believe they sacrifice nothing in the process, or at least nothing important. In fact, we have lost more and more chances to acquire skills, because skills themselves have come to seem unimportant.

"This is very dangerous," Carr says. "People don't master the technique first; they just rely on the computer and let it do the job for them. So you never become proficient at the skill. So you have no foundation at all. That way, human intelligence has no way to rise to a higher level."

Automation efficiently reduces how much people take part in their work, and seems to make life easier, more comfortable and more convenient. But automation is driven by profit: it makes work less complex and less challenging, but it has no obligation to make people happier.

"We see that we can't seem to do certain concrete things without the help of some kind of computer or screen," Carr says. Thinking about how smart devices affect people has taken up most of his energy in recent years. "I call this invisible influence the glass cage."

Carr believes signs of human decline are already showing at many levels

"For me, the most dangerous thing is that the more you depend on your phone or computer, the less direct experience we get. Skills come from practice and experience, so the less we work at improving our skills, the more we depend on phones and computers. It's a vicious circle: rely on the phone, lose your talents," Carr told QDaily.

As automation erodes skill, pilots, who sit at the top of the professions in both pay and technical demands, are a textbook example.

Everyone agrees that advances in automation are one reason flying has become safer. Thanks to mechanization and computerization, along with progress in aircraft design, airline safety procedures, pilot training and air traffic control, accident rates and casualties have fallen sharply over the past few decades.

But when the onboard computers fail and pilots must fly by hand, they often make mistakes, sometimes with catastrophic results.

The Air France crash of May 2009 is the classic case. The plane ran into a storm over the Atlantic, and when the autopilot disconnected, the pilots, long out of practice at flying by hand, lost all grasp of the situation. The plane went down off an island near São Paulo, Brazil, killing everyone on board.

Nor was it the only case. In another accident shortly before, the pilot likewise failed to heed a stall warning. Investigators said that once the warning sounded, the captain "should have reacted automatically, but he was surprised and confused; instead of acting as he had been trained, he gave the wrong flight-control inputs."

Recovering from a stall is one of the first things every pilot learns, yet airline pilots spend most of their time in the air not flying the plane. Next to the autopilot, the pilots in the cockpit look more like strangers.

In Amazon's logistics system, a model case for any business school, warehouse workers need not remember where goods are stored or how they are arranged, nor work out in their heads how to pick items more efficiently. Their whole day revolves around a handheld scanner called the "gun."

The "gun" tells workers which zone to go to next, which shelf, and what to pick, much like a car's GPS.

When a cart has been filled, another group of workers scans every item with a "gun." Based on the size of each item in the order, the system picks the best box size and tells the packer whether to add air pillows against impact. The system even forecasts the day's workload in advance and calculates how many people each shift needs.

In Amazon's newest warehouse in Seattle, workers no longer even push carts to fetch goods: Kiva robots bring the shelf holding the ordered items to the worker. The robots carry cameras and sensors; a central control system calculates each destination and the shortest route, and each robot simply follows orders, shuttling across the warehouse, lifting a shelf "on its back," and moving on.

The worker only waits for the robot to arrive, reaches out for the item, packs it, and sticks on a label. The robot then carries the shelf away, and the worker stays put to handle the next one. And so on, in a loop.

Amazon employees told The Wall Street Journal that with robots, each worker can fill at least 300 orders an hour, while in warehouses without robots, even working quite hard, they manage only 100.

Here automation sets a question before us: who is actually doing the thinking? In the video, at least, Kiva seems to be thinking more.

These warehouse workers have already lost any chance to build skills. To put it bluntly, in Amazon's facilities they exist only because a robotic arm is not yet as nimble as a human hand at picking goods.

Nobel-winning economist Michael Spence has said that economic growth and employment "are moving in opposite directions in developed countries." Spence also named technology as the main cause of three trends: "Machines are replacing routine manual labor; the use of robots in manufacturing and logistics is increasingly evident, and this trend will continue and accelerate; and at the same time, in information processing, computer networks are replacing white-collar workers in routine work."

How do we break out of the glass cage?

We have indeed entered a loop: automation breeds more automation. Everyone wants to manage their lives through screens, and society has changed its own customs and procedures to fit those of computers.

Technological progress will go on whether or not our social institutions are ready for it. Carr says: "The question is, do we push this process in a direction that favors people, or one that favors machines?"

"A direction that favors people means that sometimes you don't want to automate everything that can be automated, because you want to leave some room for people who need to hone their skills," he explains.

As chances to show human intelligence and creativity grow ever scarcer, how will humans keep evolving? He believes that in designing systems or writing programs, we should follow the principle of "humans first."

"Before you automate a skill, let people master it first," he explains. "Before computers take over everything, people should have the chance to work through the whole problem and process from start to finish. In medicine, for example, a machine can predict which diseases a patient is at risk of, but the skilled, talented professional should get the first chance, and then the computer's analysis can challenge the doctor, with more data, say, or a different line of reasoning. That gives professionals room to think, and to improve their talent and insight."

Carr's worry is not just that robots take people's jobs, but that "in the short term, this brings better productivity and higher efficiency, but in the long term, it will make it hard for society to progress. Because it pushes out the people with unique insight.

"If we think we should push automation as far as it can go, we will miss those extraordinary moments, the ones only people who can think critically are able to create," Carr says. "We should stop saying, let's computerize everything as much as possible, and instead think about how to keep people involved, so that human skills don't stop improving."

"What computers can do is carry out tasks the way they've been programmed to, and they do it very well. But if humans want to progress, they also need to improve their skills." In other words: "If we keep humans involved all along, instead of handing everything to machines in one go, that will be the better choice for preserving human intelligence."

Airlines do not push autopilot to make people dumb; they push it so that even undertrained pilots can fly safely, which saves money. Amazon uses Kiva robots for most of its handling work to reduce how much efficiency depends on worker skill, so it can add or cut staff at any time as order volumes change.

When a company's fundamental goal is to make more profit for its shareholders, Carr himself knows the problem is a very thorny one, because in business the most basic force driving technological progress is taking people out of the loop.

It is also the question he has thought about most in recent years.

Asked whether the wave of automation is something of a demon, Carr gave an answer that seemed to voice the confusion of everyone hooked on their phone. "I don't know. I haven't used the word demon, but I don't think it necessarily makes our lives richer," he said.

After a pause of a second or two, he added: "But I still love it."

Cover photo: Merrick Chase