"The computer," says Nicholas Carr, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, "is becoming our all-purpose tool for navigating, manipulating, and understanding the world, in both its physical and its social manifestations." We use apps to help us with shopping, cooking, exercising, even finding a date. We surrender to GPS instructions to go from one place to another. We rely upon social networks to keep in touch with friends and express our feelings. We look to the Internet for recommendations of movies, books, and music. We use Google as a library giving us access to all the information that we need. Carr notes that many people feel disabled without their "digital assistants."
All of this dependence on automation is diminishing our skills and perception of things. Some airplane crashes have occurred because pilots put planes on automatic pilot convinced that technology would function flawlessly. Other studies have revealed that architects' increased reliance on computer-aided design (CAD) programs have resulted in a constricted perspectives, less creativity, and designs that are emotionally flat.
Everything is being automated or as Netscape founder and Silicon Valley grandee Mac Andreessen puts it, "software is eating the world." Carr looks at the impact of automation on medicine and how doctors are learning, making decisions, and carrying themselves in bedside visits to patients. All of these developments lead the author to ask some hard ethical questions about computer-run cars and robots in the home and the workplace. It's been predicted that by 2040, computers will have rescued us from labor and delivered us into an upgraded Eden. Then what?
