Software no longer merely supplements human thought and judgment but, in an increasing number of cases, supplants them altogether. ‘Intellectual automation’ has come to exert an unprecedented hold over our lives, often profoundly altering them in unanticipated ways. Automation is no longer confined to the manual realm in the past decade, its tentacles have spread to the intellectual domain, taking over every aspect of our lives, from computers to check-out systems, from apps to watches, from cars to planes. In The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, Carr generalises his argument to intellectual technologies. Far from encouraging divergent thinking, the internet flattens our cognitive horizons and reinforces pre-existing biases. Our thought patterns are realigned with the fragmented and fleeting streams of the Net. Bombardment by data, stimuli, instructions, suggestions, pokes and auditory cues rewire our physical brain to crave constant distraction and undermine our ability to sustain concentration or think deeply, both of which are necessary for the formation of long-term memory.

Like the map and clock before it, the internet is imbued with an ethos that has far-reaching effects, actively reshaping the human mind. In his previous book The Shallows: How the Internet is Shaping the Way We Think, Read and Remember(2010), Nicholas Carr disputed the alleged neutrality of the internet as a medium. The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us. As Carr’s nuanced approach communicates caution without positing either a fully utopian or dystopian view of technological advances, Audrey Borowski praises the book for its reflections on how automation is engendering a re-evaluation of ‘the human’ itself. In The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, Nicholas Carr expands upon his prior examination of the internet’s impact upon the workings of the human mind by turning his attention to the implications of wider processes of automation.

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