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Automation for the People?

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http://www.democracyjournal.org/35/autom...p?page=all

EXCERPT: One Monday in June 2009, at the start of the evening rush hour in Washington, D.C., a computer killed nine people. At least that’s one possible interpretation of the crash that occurred at a suburban Metrorail station. The train was in ATO, or “automatic train operation” mode, which means a computer was in control. Investigators later determined that the complicated automatic sensor mechanisms embedded in the trains and tracks had failed, causing one train traveling at almost 50 miles per hour to crash into the back of another stopped at the station. The human operator of the train, realizing too late what was happening, tried in the last few seconds to pull the emergency brake. She died along with eight others that day. It was the worst transportation disaster in the history of the D.C. Metro system.

No one would claim a computer intentionally killed, of course, but the day’s events were the unforeseen, tragic consequence of something that increasingly governs many aspects of our daily lives: computer automation.

In The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Nicholas Carr, the author of several books about technology, explores our increasing reliance on automation. “The computer is becoming our all-purpose tool for navigating, manipulating, and understanding the world, in both its physical and its social manifestations,” Carr writes. Now, often unwittingly, we allow computers to automate aspects of our lives that never used to be subject to the control of software or hardware. Carr’s astute survey of automation shows just how quickly and uncritically we have outsourced the daily experience of being human to algorithms and machines, and how crucial it is to stop and reflect on what we are doing to ourselves....
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