All Can Be Lost By Nicholas Carr Summary

At first glance it appears that one should take heart from Nicolas Carr’s sentence, “Computers can be programmed to perform complex activities in which a succession of tightly coordinated tasks is carried out through an evaluation of many variables”; it speaks of human ingenuity and technological progress that should open new frontiers. However, a closer read reveals that Carr is actually warning us about the dangers of increasing automation and how an over reliance on computers is reducing us to “high-tech clerks” in his ominously entitled essay, All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines. He argues how at first automation reduced our work load, allowing us to follow more intellectual pursuits, but now the

He explains automation complacency as the "false sense of security" that relying on machines leads to, resulting in disengagement from our work whereas automation bias occurs when we trust any information from our machines. I could relate to Carr's example of bias due to an over reliance on spell-checker having often been surprised at simple errors that escaped me due to placing too much faith in my word-processing soft ware. While this alerts us to the need to develop ways to overcome these threats such as training pilots to fly manually at times, the overall benefits of automation outweigh the risks. Carr himself acknowledges the improvement in flight safety over the years resulting in a steady decline in plane crashes. In fact, Boer Deng, in his article, Machine ethics, quotes Bernhard Weidermann, a spokesperson for Daimler in Stuttgart, as saying that the attempt has been to develop robots that perform tasks that " humans are bad at", such as maintaining attention on long drives. Despite the negative portrayal of AI in popular fiction, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the benefits that machines bring; automation creates new opportunities for human ingenuity. Our desire to develop increasing complex and intelligent machines is indeed led by the desire to improve our lives; to live healthier and longer lives, to explore the

In her essay, Watson's next step, Arianna Cha Cha cites Rob Merkel, head of IBM Watson's health group, who claims that a single person will generate enough health related data to fill 300 million books. Only a computer can make sense of this data and if we are open-minded, the computer can in fact, help us make more informed decisions; the risks of relying on a computer may be worth the benefits especially when it comes to life-and-death situations. In Cha's essay she describes how a young mother suffering from leukemia is willing to take the help of the IBM supercomputer, Watson, in suggesting alternate forms of treatment-but in effect, it is not the machine that she is trusting, it is her doctor whose advice she is relying upon. Akin to our having faith in those who are behind the strides being made in automation; trusting the spirit of human knowledge that will in turn foster the progress in