The Glass Cage

Automation

Automation defines the technology age. You don’t need to remember driving directions since your GPS tells you where to go. Soon, you may not need to learn to drive at all. Google’s self-driving fleet of automated Toyota Priuses has already logged nearly a million miles without incident. The only accident occurred when a person took over driving one of the automated cars at Google’s headquarters in California.

Google’s experiment creates a new frontier in the world of automation. Scientists long thought computers could excel only at “explicit knowledge” – making calculations, for instance – and would fall short at “tacit skills” like walking down a crowded street or chasing a flying baseball. Yet Google cars have mastered the tacit skill of driving. Computer programmers can now break down skills requiring tacit knowledge into coded bits of explicit knowledge their machines can understand. If programmers can automate making a left turn at a busy intersection, they can mechanize other tasks, from flying airplanes to analyzing financial statements.

Automation is neither all good nor all bad, though today’s rise of the machine would cause Luddites to recoil...