A word processor might have saved Tolstoy enough time to write three more works like ‘War and Peace.’

Vending machine

One of the automated car-storage towers at Autostadt, a Volkswagen complex in Wolfsburg, Germany. © Sebastian Kahnert/DPA/Corbis

Four years ago, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” sent millions of people running for the hills to live in communes and go off the grid. Well, not really. But he did warn of the dangers of the Internet and how it is making us dumb. Now, in “The Glass Cage,” Mr. Carr lays out a convincing case that automation—big automation like autopilots in planes and GPS in cars—is not only making us dumb but turning the economy topsy-turvy, creating an inexorably increasing “technological unemployment gap” between food-service jobs (at one end) and high-finance jobs (at the other), a result of there being fewer and fewer opportunities for employment at middle-skill levels.

In addition to the economic consequences, “The Glass Cage” explores the alienating and “deskilling” effects of this high-tech transformation. As Mr. Carr explains it, the book is “about automation’s human consequences. . . . We’re looking to computers to shoulder more of our work, on the job and off.” The problem is that as automation does more for us, we become more reliant on it, more complacent and less skilled. Doctors are missing important diagnoses because of this reliance, pilots’ skills are eroding and our ability to frame questions accurately, to articulate what we’re looking for, is crumbling. (Mr. Carr quotes statistics that as Google gets better, our searches become sloppier and less precise.)...Continue Reading

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