I love reading Nicholas Carr, so bright he is and such a blessedly lucid writer, though I don’t always find myself agreeing with him. I won’t blame him for the headline of his latest WSJ piece, “Automation Makes Us Dumb,” but I do take issue with his idea that we should be alarmed that AI is causing “skill fade” in airline pilots, making it dangerous to fly. It’s no less scary for a plane to crash by human hand rather than because of a computer failure (or because of some combined failure of the two). It’s bad regardless. But accidents on domestic airlines in America have become almost non-existent as the crafts have become more computerized and we’ve learned to navigate wind shears. That wouldn’t be the case without machines aiding planes, which are, you know, machines. I think Carr’s enthusiasm for “adaptive automation” makes sense, at least in the short and medium terms, though ultimately I favor whatever most often prevents plane noses from touching earth. From Carr:

“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.’

We are learning that lesson again today on a much broader scale. As software has become capable of analysis and decision-making, automation has leapt out of the factory and into the white-collar world. Computers are taking over the kinds of knowledge work long considered the preserve of well-educated, well-trained professionals: Pilots rely on computers to fly planes; doctors consult them in diagnosing ailments; architects use them to design buildings. Automation’s new wave is hitting just about everyone.”