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.
4.Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20.
5.Tom A. Schweizer et al., “Brain Activity during Driving with Distraction: An Immersive fMRI Study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, February 28, 2013, frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00053/full.
6.N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2.
7.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre, “Optimal Experience in Work and Leisure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56, no. 5 (1989): 815–822.
8.Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, “Miswanting: Some Problems in the Forecasting of Future Affective States,” in Joseph P. Forgas, ed., Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 179.
9.Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, “Optimal Experience in Work and Leisure.”
10.Quoted in John Geirland, “Go with the Flow,” Wired, September 1996.
11.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1991), 157–162.
Chapter Two: THE ROBOT AT THE GATE
1.R. H. Macmillan, Automation: Friend or Foe? (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 1.
2.Ibid., 91.
3.Ibid., 1–6. The emphasis is Macmillan’s.
4.Ibid., 92.
5.George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), x.
6.Bertrand Russell, “Machines and the Emotions,” in Sceptical Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), 64.
7.Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 7–10.
8.Ibid., 408.
9.Malcolm I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, U.K.: David & Charles, 1970), 50. See also E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” Past and Present 1, no. 1 (1952): 57–70.
10.Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 461–462.
11.Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper,” April 14, 1856, marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm.
12.Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 40.
13.Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper.”
14.Quoted in Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 41. In a famous passage in The German Ideology, published in 1846, Marx foresaw a day when he would be free “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Miswanting has rarely sounded so rhapsodic.
15.E. Levasseur, “The Concentration of Industry, and Machinery in the United States,” Publications of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, no. 193 (1897): 178–197.
16.Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 2007), 1051.
17.Quoted in Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs? America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 117–118.
18.Ibid., 50.
19.Ibid., 55.
20.John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 358–373.
21.John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the Wheeling Stadium,” in John F. Kennedy: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962), 721.
22.Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 14. The emphasis is Aronowitz and DiFazio’s.
23.Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995), xv–xviii.
24.Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, Mass.: Digital Frontier Press, 2011). Brynjolfsson and McAfee extended their argument in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
25.“March of the Machines,” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 13, 2013, cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57563618/are-robots-hurting-job-growth/.
26.Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman, “Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs,” AP, January 23, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs.
27.Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon, “Will Smart Machines Create a World without Work?,” AP, January 25, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/will-smart-machines-create-world-without-work.
28.Michael Spence, “Technology and the Unemployment Challenge,” Project Syndicate, January 15, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-supply-chains-on-the-move-by-michael-spence.
29.See Timothy Aeppel, “Man vs. Machine, a Jobless Recovery,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2012.
30.Quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “The Hollowing Out,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, July 8, 2012, campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/.
31.See Lawrence V. Kenton, ed., Manufacturing Output, Productivity and Employment Implications (New York: Nova Science, 2005); and Judith Banister and George Cook, “China’s Employment and Compensation Costs in Manufacturing through 2008,” Monthly Labor Review, March 2011.
32.Tyler Cowen, “What Export-Oriented America Means,” American Interest, May/June 2012.
33.Robert Skidelsky, “The Rise of the Robots,” Project Syndicate, February 19, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-future-of-work-in-a-world-of-automation-by-robert-skidelsky.
34.Ibid.
35.Chrystia Freeland, “China, Technology and the U.S. Middle Class,” Financial Times, February 15, 2013.
36.Paul Krugman, “Is Growth Over?,” The Conscience of a Liberal (blog), New York Times, December 26, 2012, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/.
37.James R. Bright, Automation and Management (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1958), 4–5.
38.Ibid., 5.
39.Ibid., 4, 6. The emphasis is Bright’s. Bright’s definition of automation echoes Sigfried Giedion’s earlier definition of mechanization: “Mechanization is an agent—like water, fire, light. It is blind and without direction of its own. Like the powers of nature, mechanization depends on man’s capacity to make use of it and to protect himself from its inherent perils. Because mechanization sprang entirely from the mind of man, it is the more dangerous to him.” Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 714.
40.David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 247.
41.Stuart Bennett, A History of Control Engineering, 1800–1930 (London: Peter Peregrinus, 1979), 99–100.
42.Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo, 1954), 153.
43.Eric W. Leaver and J. J. Brown, “Machines without Men,” Fortune, November 1946. See also David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 67–71.
44.Noble, Forces of Production, 234.
45.Ibid., 21–40.
46.Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 148–162.
47.Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 251.
48.Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.
Chapter Three: ON AUTOPILOT
1.The account of the Continental Connection crash draws primarily from the National Transportation Safety Board’s Accident Report AAR-10/01: Loss of Control on Approach, Colgan Air, Inc., Operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407, Bombardier DHC 8-400, N200WQ, Clarence, New York, February 12, 2009 (Washington, D.C.: NTSB, 2010), www.ntsb.gov/doclib/reports/2010/aar1001.pdf. See also Matthew L. Wald, “Pilots Chatted in Moments before Buffalo Crash,” New York Times, May 12, 2009.
2.Associated Press, “Inquiry in New York Air Crash Points to Crew Error,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2009.
3.The account of the Air France crash draws primarily from BEA, Final Report: On the Accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203, Registered F-GZCP, Operated by Air France, Flight AF447, Rio de Janeiro to Paris (official English translation), July 27, 2012, www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/f-cp090601.en.pdf. See also Jeff Wise,“What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447,” Popular Mechanics, December 6, 2011, www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877.
4.BEA, Final Report, 199.
5.William Scheck, “Lawrence Sperry: Genius on Autopilot,” Aviation History, November 2004; Dave Higdon, “Used Correctly, Autopilots Offer Second-Pilot Safety Benefits,” Avionics News, May 2010; and Anonymous, “George the Autopilot,” Historic Wings, August 30, 2012, fly.historicwings.com/2012/08/george-the-autopilot/.
6.“Now—The Automatic Pilot,” Popular Science Monthly, February 1930.
7.“Post’s Automatic Pilot,” New York Times, July 24, 1933.
8.James M. Gillespie, “We Flew the Atlantic ‘No Hands,’ ” Popular Science, December 1947.
9.Anonymous, “Automatic Control,” Flight, October 9, 1947.
10.For a thorough account of NASA’s work, see Lane E. Wallace, Airborne Trailblazer: Two Decades with NASA Langley’s 737 Flying Laboratory (Washington, D.C.: NASA History Office, 1994).
11.William Langewiesche, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the “Miracle” on the Hudson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 103.
12.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), 20.
13.Don Harris, Human Performance on the Flight Deck (Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 221.
14.“How Does Automation Affect Airline Safety?,” Flight Safety Foundation, July 3, 2012, flightsafety.org/node/4249.
15.Hemant Bhana, “Trust but Verify,” AeroSafety World, June 2010.
16.Quoted in Nick A. Komons, Bonfires to Beacons: Federal Civil Aviation Policy under the Air Commerce Act 1926–1938 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1978), 24.
17.Scott Mayerowitz and Joshua Freed, “Air Travel Safer than Ever with Death Rate at Record Low,” Denverpost.com, January 1 , 2012, denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_19653967. Deaths from terrorist acts are not included in the figures.
18.Interview of Raja Parasuraman by author, December 18, 2011.
19.Jan Noyes, “Automation and Decision Making,” in Malcolm James Cook et al., eds., Decision Making in Complex Environments (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007), 73.
20.Earl L. Wiener, Human Factors of Advanced Technology (“Glass Cockpit”) Transport Aircraft (Moffett Field, Calif.: NASA Ames Research Center, June 1989).
21.See, for example, Earl L. Wiener and Renwick E. Curry, “Flight-Deck Automation: Promises and Problems,” NASA Ames Research Center, June 1980; Earl L. Wiener, “Beyond the Sterile Cockpit,” Human Factors 27, no. 1 (1985): 75–90; Donald Eldredge et al., A Review and Discussion of Flight Management System Incidents Reported to the Aviation Safety Reporting System (Washington, D.C.: Federal Aviation Administration, February 1992); and Matt Ebbatson, “Practice Makes Imperfect: Common Factors in Recent Manual Approach Incidents,” Human Factors and Aerospace Safety 6, no. 3 (2006): 275–278.
22.Andy Pasztor, “Pilot Reliance on Automation Erodes Skills,” Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2010.
23.Operational Use of Flight Path Management Systems: Final Report of the Performance-Based Operations Aviation Rulemaking Committee/Commercial Aviation Safety Team Flight Deck Automation Working Group (Washington, D.C.: Federal Aviation Administration, September 5, 2013), www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/afs/afs400/parc/parc_reco/media/2013/130908_PARC_FltDAWG_Final_Report_Recommendations.pdf.
24.Matthew Ebbatson, “The Loss of Manual Flying Skills in Pilots of Highly Automated Airliners” (PhD thesis, Cranfield University School of Engineering, 2009). See also M. Ebbatson et al., “The Relationship between Manual Handling Performance and Recent Flying Experience in Air Transport Pilots,” Ergonomics 53, no. 2 (2010): 268–277.
25.Quoted in David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 77.
26.S. Bennett, A History of Control Engineering, 1800–1930 (Stevenage, U.K.: Peter Peregrinus, 1979), 141.
27.Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Picador, 1979), 152–154.
28.Ebbatson, “Loss of Manual Flying Skills.”
29.European Aviation Safety Agency, “Response Charts for ‘EASA Cockpit Automation Survey,’ ” August 3, 2012, easa.europa.eu/safety-and-research/docs/EASA%20Cockpit%20Automation%20Survey%202012%20-%20Results.pdf.
30.Joan Lowy, “Automation in the Air Dulls Pilot Skill,” Seattle Times, August 30, 2011.
31.For a good review of changes in the size of flight crews, see Delmar M. Fadden et al., “First Hand: Evolution of the 2-Person Crew Jet Transport Flight Deck,” IEEE Global History Network, August 25, 2008, ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/First-Hand:Evolution_of_the_2-Person_Crew_Jet_Transport_Flight_Deck.
32.Quoted in Philip E. Ross, “When Will We Have Unmanned Commercial Airliners?,” IEEE Spectrum, December 2011.
33.Scott McCartney, “Pilot Pay: Want to Know How Much Your Captain Earns?,” The Middle Seat Terminal (blog), Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2009, blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/16/pilot-pay-want-to-know-how-much-your-captain-earns/.
34.Dawn Duggan, “The 8 Most Overpaid & Underpaid Jobs,” Salary.com, undated, salary.com/the%2D8%2Dmost%2Doverpaid%2Dunderpaid%2Djobs/slide/9/.
35.David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 20.
36.Wilbur Wright, letter, May 13, 1900, in Richard Rhodes, ed., Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 33.
37.Mindell, Digital Apollo, 20.
38.Quoted in ibid., 21.
39.Wilbur Wright, “Some Aeronautical Experiments,” speech before the Western Society of Engineers, September 18, 1901, www.wright-house.com/wright-brothers/Aeronautical.html.
40.Mindell, Digital Apollo, 21.
41.J. O. Roberts, “ ‘The Case against Automation in Manned Fighter Aircraft,” SETP Quarterly Review 2, no. 3 (Fall 1957): 18–23.
42.Quoted in Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 77.
43.Harris, Human Performance on the Flight Deck, 221.
Chapter Four: THE DEGENERATION EFFECT
1.Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 61.
2.Quoted in Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4.
3.Raja Parasuraman et al., “Model for Types and Levels of Human Interaction with Automation,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics—Part A: Systems and Humans 30, no. 3 (2000): 286–297. See also Nadine Sarter et al., “Automation Surprises,” in Gavriel Salvendy, ed., Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1997).
4.Dennis F. Galletta et al., “Does Spell-Checking Software Need a Warning Label?,” Communications of the ACM 48, no. 7 (2005): 82–86.
5.National Transportation Safety Board, Marine Accident Report: Grounding of the Panamanian Passenger Ship Royal Majesty on Rose and Crown Shoal near Nantucket, Massachusetts, June 10, 1995 (Washington, D.C.: NTSB, April 2, 1997).
6.Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 55–56.
7.Jennifer Langston, “GPS Routed Bus under Bridge, Company Says,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 17, 2008.
8.A. A. Povyakalo et al., “How to Discriminate between Computer-Aided and Computer-Hindered Decisions: A Case Study in Mammography,” Medical Decision Making 33, no. 1 (January 2013): 98–107.
9.E. Alberdi et al., “Why Are People’s Decisions Sometimes Worse with Computer Support?,” in Bettina Buth et al., eds., Proceedings of SAFECOMP 2009, the 28th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability, and Security (Hamburg, Germany: Springer, 2009), 18–31.
10.See Raja Parasuraman et al., “Performance Consequences of Automation-Induced ‘Complacency,’ ” International Journal of Aviation Psychology 3, no. 1 (1993): 1–23.
11.Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich H. Manzey, “Complacency and Bias in Human Use of Automation: An Attentional Integration,” Human Factors 52, no. 3 (June 2010): 381–410.
12.Norman J. Slamecka and Peter Graf, “The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 4, no. 6 (1978): 592–604.
13.Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt, “Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping,” Science 331 (2011): 772–775.
14.Britte Haugan Cheng, “Generation in the Knowledge Integration Classroom” (PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2008).
15.Simon Farrell and Stephan Lewandowsky, “A Connectionist Model of Complacency and Adaptive Recovery under Automation,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26, no. 2 (2000): 395–410.
16.I first discussed van Nimwegen’s work in my book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 214–216.
17.Christof van Nimwegen, “The Paradox of the Guided User: Assistance Can Be Counter-effective” (SIKS Dissertation Series No. 2008-09, Utrecht University, March 31, 2008). See also Christof van Nimwegen and Herre van Oostendorp, “The Questionable Impact of an Assisting Interface on Performance in Transfer Situations,” International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 39, no. 3 (May 2009): 501–508; and Daniel Burgos and Christof van Nimwegen, “Games-Based Learning, Destination Feedback and Adaptation: A Case Study of an Educational Planning Simulation,” in Thomas Connolly et al., eds., Games-Based Learning Advancements for Multi-Sensory Human Computer Interfaces: Techniques and Effective Practices (Hershey, Penn.: IGI Global, 2009), 119–130.
18.Carlin Dowling et al., “Audit Support System Design and the Declarative Knowledge of Long-Term Users,” Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting 5, no. 1 (December 2008): 99–108.
19.See Richard G. Brody et al., “The Effect of a Computerized Decision Aid on the Development of Knowledge,” Journal of Business and Psychology 18, no. 2 (2003): 157–174; and Holli McCall et al., “Use of Knowledge Management Systems and the Impact on the Acquisition of Explicit Knowledge,” Journal of Information Systems 22, no. 2 (2008): 77–101.
20.Amar Bhidé, “The Judgment Deficit,” Harvard Business Review 88, no. 9 (September 2010): 44–53.
21.Gordon Baxter and John Cartlidge, “Flying by the Seat of Their Pants: What Can High Frequency Trading Learn from Aviation?,” in G. Brat et al., eds., ATACCS-2013: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Application and Theory of Automation in Command and Control Systems (New York: ACM, 2013), 64–73.
22.Vivek Haldar, “Sharp Tools, Dull Minds,” This Is the Blog of Vivek Haldar, November 10, 2013, blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/66660163006/sharp-tools-dull-minds.
23.Tim Adams, “Google and the Future of Search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph,” Observer, January 19, 2013.
24.Betsy Sparrow et al., “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” Science 333, no. 6043 (August 5, 2011): 776–778. Another study suggests that simply knowing an experience has been photographed with a digital camera weakens a person’s memory of the experience: Linda A. Henkel, “Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour,” Psychological Science, December 5, 2013, pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/12/04/0956797613504438.full.
25.Mihai Nadin, “Information and Semiotic Processes: The Semiotics of Computation,” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 18, nos. 1–2 (2011): 153–175.
26.Gary Marcus, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning (New York: Penguin, 2012), 52.
27.For a thorough description of how the brain learns to read, see Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), particularly 108–133.
28.Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Intelligence without Representation—Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002): 367–383.
29.Marcus, Guitar Zero, 103.
30.David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz, “Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (2011): 275–279.
31.K. Anders Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.
32.Nigel Warburton, “Robert Talisse on Pragmatism,” Five Books, September 18, 2013, fivebooks.com/interviews/robert-talisse-on-pragmatism.
33.Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, eds., Handbook of Positive Psychology (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90–91.
Interlude, with Dancing Mice
1.Robert M. Yerkes, The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1907), vii–viii, 2–3.
2.Ibid., vii.
3.Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation,” Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18 (1908): 459–482.
4.Ibid.
5.Mark S. Young and Neville A. Stanton, “Attention and Automation: New Perspectives on Mental Overload and Performance,” Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science 3, no. 2 (2002): 178–194.
6.Mark W. Scerbo, “Adaptive Automation,” in Raja Parasuraman and Matthew Rizzo, eds., Neuroergonomics: The Brain at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 239–252.
Chapter Five: WHITE-COLLAR COMPUTER
1.“RAND Study Says Computerizing Medical Records Could Save $81 Billion Annually and Improve the Quality of Medical Care,” RAND Corporation press release, September 14, 2005.
2.Richard Hillestad et al., “Can Electronic Medical Record Systems Transform Health Care? Potential Health Benefits, Savings, and Costs,” Health Affairs 24, no. 5 (2005): 1103–1117.
3.Reed Abelson and Julie Creswell, “In Second Look, Few Savings from Digital Health Records,” New York Times, January 10, 2013.
4.Jeanne Lambrew, “More than Half of Doctors Now Use Electronic Health Records Thanks to Administration Policies,” The White House Blog, May 24, 2013, whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/24/more-half-doctors-use-electronic-health-records-thanks-administration-policies.
5.Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones, “What It Will Take to Achieve the As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises of Health Information Technology,” Health Affairs 32, no. 1 (2013): 63–68.
6.Ashly D. Black et al., “The Impact of eHealth on the Quality and Safety of Health Care: A Systematic Overview,” PLOS Medicine 8, no. 1 (2011), plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000387.
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.
21.See, for example, Jan M. Wiener et al., “Maladaptive Bias for Extrahippocampal Navigation Strategies in Aging Humans,” Journal of Neuroscience 33, no. 14 (2013): 6012–6017.
22.See, for example, A. T. Du et al., “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Entorhinal Cortex and Hippocampus in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 71 (2001): 441–447.
23.Kyoko Konishi and Véronique D. Bohbot, “Spatial Navigational Strategies Correlate with Gray Matter in the Hippocampus of Healthy Older Adults Tested in a Virtual Maze,” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 5 (2013): 1–8.
24.Email from Véronique Bohbot to author, June 4, 2010.
25.Quoted in Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems,” Walrus, November 2009.
26.Kyle VanHemert, “4 Reasons Why Apple’s iBeacon Is About to Disrupt Interaction Design,” Wired, December 11, 2013, www.wired.com/design/2013/12/4-use-cases-for-ibeacon-the-most-exciting-tech-you-havent-heard-of/.
27.Quoted in Fallows, “Places You’ll Go.”
28.Damon Lavrinc, “Mercedes Is Testing Google Glass Integration, and It Actually Works,” Wired, August 15, 2013, wired.com/autopia/2013/08/google-glass-mercedes-benz/.
29.William J. Mitchell, “Foreword,” in Yehuda E. Kalay, Architecture’s New Media: Principles, Theories, and Methods of Computer-Aided Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), xi.
30.Anonymous, “Interviews: Renzo Piano,” Architectural Record, October 2001, archrecord.construction.com/people/interviews/archives/0110piano.asp.
31.Quoted in Gavin Mortimer, The Longest Night (New York: Penguin, 2005), 319.
32.Dino Marcantonio, “Architectural Quackery at Its Finest: Parametricism,” Marcantonio Architects Blog, May 8, 2010, blog.marcantonioarchitects.com/architectural-quackery-at-its-finest-parametricism/.
33.Paul Goldberger, “Digital Dreams,” New Yorker, March 12, 2001.
34.Patrik Schumacher, “Parametricism as Style—Parametricist Manifesto,” Patrik Schumacher’s blog, 2008, patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametricism%20as%20Style.htm.
35.Anonymous, “Interviews: Renzo Piano.”
36.Witold Rybczynski, “Think before You Build,” Slate, March 30, 2011, slate.com/articles/arts/architecture/2011/03/think_before_you_build.html.
37.Quoted in Bryan Lawson, Design in Mind (Oxford, U.K.: Architectural Press, 1994), 66.
38.Michael Graves, “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing,” New York Times, September 2, 2012.
39.D. A. Schön, “Designing as Reflective Conversation with the Materials of a Design Situation,” Knowledge-Based Systems 5, no. 1 (1992): 3–14. See also Schön’s book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983), particularly 157–159.
40.Graves, “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing.” See also Masaki Suwa et al., “Macroscopic Analysis of Design Processes Based on a Scheme for Coding Designers’ Cognitive Actions,” Design Studies 19 (1998): 455–483.
41.Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007), 58.
42.Schön, “Designing as Reflective Conversation.”
43.Ibid.
44.Joachim Walther et al., “Avoiding the Potential Negative Influence of CAD Tools on the Formation of Students’ Creativity,” in Proceedings of the 2007 AaeE Conference, Melbourne, Australia, December 2007, ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/aaee2007/papers/paper_40.pdf.
45.Graves, “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing.”
46.Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley, 2009), 96–97.
47.Interview of E. J. Meade by author, July 23, 2013.
48.Jacob Brillhart, “Drawing towards a More Creative Architecture: Mediating between the Digital and the Analog,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Montreal, Canada, March 5, 2011.
49.Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin, 2009), 164.
50.Ibid., 161.
51.John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), 13–14.
52.Matthew D. Lieberman, “The Mind-Body Illusion,” Psychology Today, May 17, 2012, psychologytoday.com/blog/social-brain-social-mind/201205/the-mind-body-illusion. See also Matthew D. Lieberman, “What Makes Big Ideas Sticky?,” in Max Brockman, ed., What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science (New York: Vintage, 2009), 90–103.
53.“Andy Clark: Embodied Cognition” (video), University of Edinburgh: Research in a Nutshell, undated, nutshell-videos.ed.ac.uk/andy-clark-embodied-cognition.
54.Tim Gollisch and Markus Meister, “Eye Smarter than Scientists Believed: Neural Computations in Circuits of the Retina,” Neuron 65 (January 28, 2010): 150–164.
55.See Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22, no. 3/4 (2005): 455–479; and Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 617–645.
56.“Andy Clark: Embodied Cognition.”
57.Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2005), 247.
58.Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.
59.Quoted in Fallows, “Places You’ll Go.”
Chapter Seven: AUTOMATION FOR THE PEOPLE
1.Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, January 2013.
2.Jay Yarow, “Human Driver Crashes Google’s Self Driving Car,” Business Insider, August 5, 2011, businessinsider.com/googles-self-driving-cars-get-in-their-first-accident-2011-8.
3.Andy Kessler, “Professors Are About to Get an Online Education,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2013.
4.Vinod Khosla, “Do We Need Doctors or Algorithms?,” TechCrunch, January 10, 2012, techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/doctors-or-algorithms.
5.Gerald Traufetter, “The Computer vs. the Captain: Will Increasing Automation Make Jets Less Safe?,” Spiegel Online, July 31, 2009, spiegel.de/international/world/the-computer-vs-the-captain-will-increasing-automation-make-jets-less-safe-a-639298.html.
6.See Adam Fisher, “Inside Google’s Quest to Popularize Self-Driving Cars,” Popular Science, October 2013.
7.Tosha B. Weeterneck et al., “Factors Contributing to an Increase in Duplicate Medication Order Errors after CPOE Implementation,” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 18 (2011): 774–782.
8.Sergey V. Buldyrev et al., “Catastrophic Cascade of Failures in Interdependent Networks,” Nature 464 (April 15, 2010): 1025–1028. See also Alessandro Vespignani, “The Fragility of Interdependency,” Nature 464 (April 15, 2010): 984–985.
9.Nancy G. Leveson, Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 8–9.
10.Lisanne Bainbridge, “Ironies of Automation,” Automatica 19, no. 6 (1983): 775–779.
11.For a review of research on vigilance, including the World War II studies, see D. R. Davies and R. Parasuraman, The Psychology of Vigilance (London: Academic Press, 1982).
12.Bainbridge, “Ironies of Automation.”
13.See Magdalen Galley, “Ergonomics—Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going,” undated speech, taylor.it/meg/papers/50%20Years%20of%20Ergonomics.pdf; and Nicolas Marmaras et al., “Ergonomic Design in Ancient Greece,” Applied Ergonomics 30, no. 4 (1999): 361–368.
14.David Meister, The History of Human Factors and Ergonomics (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999), 209, 359.
15.Leo Marx, “Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?,” Technology Review, January 1987.
16.Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (New York: Perseus, 1993), xi.
17.Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 305.
18.Nadine Sarter et al., “Automation Surprises,” in Gavriel Salvendy, ed., Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 1997).
19.Ibid.
20.John D. Lee, “Human Factors and Ergonomics in Automation Design,” in Gavriel Salvendy, ed., Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2006), 1571.
21.For more on human-centered automation, see Charles E. Billings, Aviation Automation: The Search for a Human-Centered Approach (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997); and Raja Parasuraman et al., “A Model for Types and Levels of Human Interaction with Automation,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 30, no. 3 (2000): 286–297.
22.David B. Kaber et al., “On the Design of Adaptive Automation for Complex Systems,” International Journal of Cognitive Ergonomics 5, no. 1 (2001): 37–57.
23.Mark W. Scerbo, “Adaptive Automation,” in Raja Parasuraman and Matthew Rizzo, eds., Neuroergonomics: The Brain at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 239–252. For more on the DARPA project, see Mark St. John et al., “Overview of the DARPA Augmented Cognition Technical Integration Experiment,” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 17, no. 2 (2004): 131–149.
24.Lee, “Human Factors and Ergonomics.”
25.Interview of Raja Parasuraman by author, December 18, 2011.
26.Lee, “Human Factors and Ergonomics.”
27.Interview of Ben Tranel by author, June 13, 2013.
28.Mark D. Gross and Ellen Yi-Luen Do, “Ambiguous Intentions: A Paper-like Interface for Creative Design,” in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (New York: ACM, 1996), 183–192.
29.Julie Dorsey et al., “The Mental Canvas: A Tool for Conceptual Architectural Design and Analysis,” in Proceedings of the Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (2007), 201–210.
30.William Langewiesche, Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the “Miracle” on the Hudson (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 102.
31.Lee, “Human Factors and Ergonomics.”
32.CBS News, “Faulty Data Misled Pilots in ’09 Air France Crash,” July 5, 2012, cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57466644/faulty-data-misled-pilots-in-09-air-france-crash/.
33.Langewiesche, Fly by Wire, 109.
34.Federal Aviation Administration, “NextGen Air Traffic Control/Technical Operations Human Factors (Controller Efficiency & Air Ground Integration) Research and Development Plan,” version one, April 2011.
35.Nathaniel Popper, “Bank Gains by Putting Brakes on Traders,” New York Times, June 26, 2013.
36.Thomas P. Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 101–113.
37.Gordon Baxter and John Cartlidge, “Flying by the Seat of Their Pants: What Can High Frequency Trading Learn from Aviation?,” in G. Brat et al., eds., ATACCS-2013: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Application and Theory of Automation in Command and Control Systems (New York: ACM, 2013), 64–73.
38.David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 144–145.
39.Ibid., 94.
40.Quoted in Noble, Forces of Production, 94.
41.Ibid., 326.
42.Dyson made this comment in the 1981 documentary The Day after Trinity. Quoted in Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000.
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.