Wall Street Journal Artificial intelligence has arrived. Today’s computers are discerning
and sharp. They can sense the environment, untangle knotty problems,
make subtle judgments and learn from experience. They don’t think the
way we think—they’re still as mindless as toothpicks—but they can
replicate many of our most prized intellectual talents. Dazzled by our
brilliant new machines, we’ve been rushing to hand them all sorts of
sophisticated jobs that we used to do ourselves.
But our growing
reliance on computer automation may be exacting a high price. Worrisome
evidence suggests that our own intelligence is withering as we become
more dependent on the artificial variety. Rather than lifting us up,
smart software seems to be dumbing us down.[...]
Then, in the 1950s, a Harvard Business School professor named
James Bright
went into the field to study automation’s actual effects on a
variety of industries, from heavy manufacturing to oil refining to bread
baking. Factory conditions, he discovered, were anything but uplifting.
More often than not, the new machines were leaving workers with
drabber, less demanding jobs. An automated milling machine, for example,
didn’t transform the metalworker into a more creative artisan; it
turned him into a pusher of buttons.
Bright concluded that the
overriding effect of automation was (in the jargon of labor economists)
to “de-skill” workers rather than to “up-skill” them. “The lesson should
be increasingly clear,” he wrote in 1966. “Highly complex equipment”
did not require “skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be built into the
machine.”[...]
Late last year, a report from a Federal Aviation Administration task
force on cockpit technology documented a growing link between crashes
and an overreliance on automation. Pilots have become “accustomed to
watching things happen, and reacting, instead of being proactive,” the
panel warned. The FAA is now urging airlines to get pilots to spend more
time flying by hand.[...]
The philosopher
Hubert Dreyfus
of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in 2002 that
human expertise develops through “experience in a variety of situations,
all seen from the same perspective but requiring different tactical
decisions.” In other words, our skills get sharper only through
practice, when we use them regularly to overcome different sorts of
difficult challenges.
The goal of modern software, by contrast,
is to ease our way through such challenges. Arduous, painstaking work is
exactly what programmers are most eager to automate—after all, that is
where the immediate efficiency gains tend to lie. In other words, a
fundamental tension ripples between the interests of the people doing
the automation and the interests of the people doing the work. [...]
Harvard Medical School professor
Beth Lown,
in a 2012 journal article written with her student
Dayron Rodriquez,
warned that when doctors become “screen-driven,” following a
computer’s prompts rather than “the patient’s narrative thread,” their
thinking can become constricted. In the worst cases, they may miss
important diagnostic signals. [...]
We do not have to resign ourselves to this situation, however.
Automation needn’t remove challenges from our work and diminish our
skills. Those losses stem from what ergonomists and other scholars call
“technology-centered automation,” a design philosophy that has come to
dominate the thinking of programmers and engineers. [....]
There is an alternative.
In “human-centered automation,” the
talents of people take precedence. Systems are designed to keep the
human operator in what engineers call “the decision loop”—the continuing
process of action, feedback and judgment-making. That keeps workers
attentive and engaged and promotes the kind of challenging practice that
strengthens skills.[...]