Author: Nicholas Carr
File Type: epub
At once a celebration of technology and a warning about its misuse, The Glass Cage will change the way you think about the tools you use every day.In The Glass Cage, best-selling author Nicholas Carr digs 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. Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly peoples 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.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.With a characteristic blend of history and philosophy, poetry and science, Carr 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.ReviewNicholas Carr is among the most lucid, thoughtful and necessary thinkers alive. The Glass Cage should be required reading for everyone with a phone -- Jonathan Safran Foer Written with restrained objectivity, The Glass Cage is nevertheless as scary as any sci-fi thriller could be -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow The Psychology of Optimal Experience Nicholas Carr is the rare thinker who understands that technological progress is both essential and worrying. The Glass Cage is a call for technology that complements our human capabilities, rather than replacing them -- Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody A very necessary book, that we ignore at our peril. I read it without putting it down -- Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary About the AuthorNicholas Carr is the author of The Shallows, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as The Big Switch 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.