The Other Side of a Robot Taking Your Job

Technological Unemployment  

Summary There are financial and economic effects of a robot taking your job, but there are also psychological and neurological consequences.  Nicholas Carr explores these in his new book, The Glass Cage.

When it comes to robots taking our jobs, there are real economic impacts affecting national economies and personal finances.  The robots and artificial intelligence systems are taking up more and more of our tasks in the never-ending quest to raise productivity.  But there are other consequences to us loosing our work as well.

In The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, author Nicholas Carr looks behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, these programs are stealing something essential from us.

"As computers become our constant companions, our familiar, obliging helpmates, it seems wise to take a close look at exactly how they're changing what we do and who we are."

"Automation can take a toll on our work, our talents and our lives," writes Carr. "It can narrow our perpectives and limit our choices. It can open us to surveillance and manipulation. As computers become our constant companions, our familiar, obliging helpmates, it seems wise to take a close look at exactly how they're changing what we do and who we are."

Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly people’s happiness and satisfaction are tied to performing hard work in the real world, Carr reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.

“Artificial intelligence has that name for a reason—it isn’t natural, it isn’t human. As Nicholas Carr argues so gracefully and convincingly in this important, insightful book, it is time for people to regain the art of thinking. It is time to invent a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity,” says Design of Everyday Things author Donald Norman.

From nineteenth-century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the sterile landscapes of GPS maps, The Glass Cage explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective, examining the personal as well as the economic consequences of our growing dependence on computers.

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Without being a rant against technology or automation Carr is able to look at the phenomenon from a new perspective. We are quite aware of what we gain through automation, but no one is looking at what we're losing.

Carr's point is that we can use both more intelligently if we are aware of what we are giving up to get the speed, efficiency, convenience.

Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google and Does IT Matter? His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and the New Republic, and he writes the widely read blog Rough Type. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and an executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. takes us on a journey from the work and early theory of Adam Smith and Alfred North Whitehead to the latest research into human attention, memory, and happiness, culminating in a moving meditation on how we can use technology to expand the human experience.

In the video below, two of Rethink Robotics Baxter robots work at Standby Screw Machine Products, a leading manufacturer of custom parts for outdoor power equipment and automotive industries.  In once case, a single robot can pack two boxes at once, saving the labor of more than one worker. 

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