The Glass Cage Quotes

“There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

“the mind is not sealed in the skull but extends throughout the body. We think not only with our brain but also with our eyes and ears, nose and mouth, limbs and torso. And when we use tools to extend our grasp, we think with them as well. “Thinking, or knowledge-getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be,” wrote the American philosopher and social reformer John Dewey in 1916. “Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes in the brain.”51 To act is to think, and to think is to act.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

“The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we learn, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

“As a society, we've become suspicious of such acts. Out of ignorance or laziness or timidity, we've turned the Luddites into caricatures, emblems of backwardness. We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally. But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That's the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is. What matters is how it enlarges us or diminishes us, how it shapes our experience of nature and culture and one another. To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Some of the test subjects were given cards that had both words printed in full, like this:

Hot: Cold

Others used cards that showed only the first letter of the second word, like this:

Hot: C

The people who used the cards with the missing letters performed much better in a subsequent test measuring how well they remembered the word pairs. Simply forcing their minds to fill in a blank, to act rather than observe, led to stronger retention of information.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“The value of a well-made and well-used tool lies not only in what it produces for us but what it produces in us.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

“Our desire to segregate the mind’s cogitations from the body’s exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we’re quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind’s work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we’re aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it’s separate from the body.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Automation weakens the bond between tool and user not because computer-controlled systems are complex but because they ask so little of us.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding s or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two? In his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott provided a vivid description of the modern rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.” The rationalist has no concern for culture or history; he neither cultivates nor displays a personal perspective. His thinking is notable only for “the rapidity with which he reduces the tangle and variety of experience” into “a formula.”54 Oakeshott’s words also provide us with a perfect description of computer intelligence: eminently practical and productive and entirely lacking in curiosity,”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us

“The airplane was a complicated system encompassing many components, but to a skilled pilot it still had the intimate quality of a hand tool. The love that lays the swale in rows is also the love that parts the clouds for the stick-and-rudder man.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Instead of requiring us to puzzle out where we are in an area, a GPS device simply sets us at the center of the map and then makes the world circulate around us.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“The connection between doing and knowing is breaking down.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“the computer is never a neutral tool. It influences, for better or worse, the way a person works and thinks.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two?”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Reducing intelligence to the statistical analysis of large data sets “can lead us,” says Levesque, “to systems with very impressive performance that are nonetheless idiot-savants.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“To cede choices about the texture of our daily lives to a grand abstraction called progress is folly”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding us or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we master, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“What they came to realize was that the newest, most automated, most expedient tool is not always the best choice. Although I’m sure they would bristle at being likened to the Luddites, their decision to forgo the latest technology, at least in some stages of their work, was an act of rebellion resembling that of the old English machine-breakers, if without the fury and the violence. Like the Luddites, they understood that decisions about technology are also decisions about ways of working and ways of living—and they took control of those decisions rather than ceding them to others or giving way to the momentum of progress. They stepped back and thought critically about technology.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Smartphones enchant, but they also enervate. The human brain is incapable of concentrating on two things at once. Every glance or swipe at a touchscreen draws us away from our immediate surroundings. With a smartphone in hand, we become a little ghostly, wavering between worlds. People have always been distractible, of course. Minds wander. Attention drifts. But we’ve never carried on our person a tool that so insistently captivates our senses and divides our attention. By connecting us to a symbolic elsewhere, the smartphone, as Brin implied, exiles us from the here and now. We lose the power of presence.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Like meddlesome parents who never let their kids do anything on their own, Google, Facebook, and other makers of personal software end up demeaning and diminishing qualities of character that, at least in the past, have been seen as essential to a full and vigorous life: ingenuity, curiosity, independence, perseverance, daring. It may be that in the future we’ll only experience such virtues vicariously, through the exploits of action figures like John Marston in the fantasy worlds we enter through screens.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“But there’s something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren’t forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data. People aren’t nodes on a network grid. The bonds require trust and courtesy and sacrifice, all of which, at least to a technocrat’s mind, are sources of inefficiency and inconvenience. Removing the friction from social attachments doesn’t strengthen them; it weakens them. It makes them more like the attachments between consumers and products—easily formed and just as easily broken.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“One of the great ironies of our time is that even as scientists discover more about the essential roles that physical action and sensory perception play in the development of our thoughts, memories, and skills, we’re spending less time acting in the world and more time living and working through the abstract medium of the computer screen. We’re disembodying ourselves, imposing sensory constraints on our existence. With the general-purpose computer, we’ve managed, perversely enough, to devise a tool that steals from us the bodily joy of working with tools.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Automation tends to turn us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit our ability to learn and to develop expertise.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“He didn’t just fly an airplane,” a fellow pilot once said of Wiley Post; “he put it on.” 42 Today’s pilots don’t wear their planes. They wear their planes’ computers—or perhaps the computers wear the pilots. The transformation that aviation has gone through over the last few decades—the shift from mechanical to digital systems, the proliferation of software and screens, the automation of mental as well as manual work, the blurring of what it means to be a pilot—offers a roadmap for the much broader transformation that society is going through now. The glass cockpit, Don Harris has pointed out, can be thought of as a prototype of a world where “there is computer functionality everywhere.” 43 The experience of pilots also reveals the subtle but often strong connection between the way automated systems are designed and the way the minds and bodies of the people using the systems work. The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill? You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone, and even then we may have trouble expressing the losses in concrete terms. But the costs are real. The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to computers and which we keep for ourselves are not just practical or economic choices. They’re ethical choices. They shape the substance of our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world. Automation confronts us with the most important question of all: What does human being mean?”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us