The gadgets that are rotting our brains

The Glass Cage: Where Automation Is Taking Us (Bodley Head, £20)

Owning a car in London has always seemed mysterious to me. What enjoyment could one possibly gain from sitting in traffic, trying to resist the weight of boredom on your eyes long enough to see the lights change? And as for convenience: my bike is faster. With Google revving us all up for the self-driving car, I hoped I might be able to resist buying one until it can make its own way home, unmanned.

That is until Nicholas Carr stepped in to put the brakes on.

According to the technology commentator’s new book The Glass Cage: Where Automation Is Taking Us, letting a car drive us home is just one of many steps we’re taking towards degrading our brains.

Carr argues, very convincingly, that automation is eroding our memory while simultaneously creating a complacency within us that will diminish our ability to gain new skills. Essentially, we will all end up with “sharp tools, dull minds”. I had always wondered if it were possible Google Maps was ruining my sense of direction. Now I am certain of it.

Carr puts much emphasis on the example of aviation where “a great deal of private and public money has gone into funding psychological and behavioural research on automation’s effects”. The automation of aeroplanes means that pilots now only hold the controls for approximately three minutes per flight while crashes such as the Air France disaster in 2009 are seemingly due to “loss of cognitive control” when the autopilot fails. It makes you wonder what will be discovered on the Air Asia black box.

Meanwhile, contrary to Oscar Wilde’s notion that machinery would eventually see us “enjoying cultivated leisure — which, and not labour, is the aim of man” the truth is that we are much happier when actively employed in taxing work than we are in our time off. And, rather than freeing us from the tyranny of our phones, the heads-up display on Google Glass will make us incapable of seeing what is right in front of us.

Carr doesn’t pretend to be the first to rage against the machines. He takes us back to the Luddite movement railing against new power looms that came about in the Industrial Revolution and quotes Marx who said: “All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life into material force.”

He’s also clearly not anti-tech. Anyone who outs himself as a serious gamer can be no such thing. (He completed Red Dead Redemption on his X-Box and, somewhat counterintuitively affords video games — those supposed time wasters — respect as a rare skill-development tech.) But, he warns, as automation infiltrates every part of our lives and even attempts to become invisible: “We should welcome the important contributions computer companies can make to society’s well-being, but we shouldn’t confuse those companies’ interests with our own.”

In a future of driverless cars, lethal robots carrying out our warfare — indeed a world of “look ma, no humans” — we will likely find ourselves manipulated by those companies, with brains gone too fuzzy to resist.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £16.50, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p