Nicholas Carr’s recent book entitled The Glass Cage: Automation and Us contains an interesting sub theme: The current rise of automation may mark the fall of Procedural Man. OK, who’s Procedural Man? Most of us are able to ride a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is a form of learned procedure. Once we have learned a procedure like bike riding, it tends to stay with us for life. Bike riding becomes natural or second nature. We will often say of a procedure—horseback riding, swimming, motorcycle riding, skiing, driving a stick shift car, sewing, playing an instrument, etc.—that once learned, “it’s just like riding a bike, it never goes away.” Carr starts out Glass Cage by talking about his days as a youth learning how to drive a stick shift car: the jerks, the stalls, the squealing wheels, the uncoordinated movements, the grinding gears, the snickers from onlookers. I haven’t driven a stick shift car in probably three years, however, I “know” that I can do it. This brings up an interesting property of learned procedures.
Learned procedures constitute a form of knowledge that is not explicit. Cognitive scientists will often refer to procedural knowledge as implicit knowledge. Carr uses the term tacit knowledge. My online dictionary defines tacit thus: Understood or implied without being stated. Explicit knowledge tends to be about objects; implicit knowledge tends to be about the “relationships” between objects. In order to “state” implicit or tacit knowledge, one has to actually do it: ride a bike, perform surgery, swim the breaststroke, ride a bike, ride a horse, drive a stick shift car, ski downhill, sew a dress, etc. Simply put, talking about downhill skiing (explicit knowledge) is not the same as actually doing it (implicit knowledge). Trust me, if you’re rolling into surgery and you spy your surgeon reading a copy of Surgery for Dummies, you are in big trouble. Reading about surgery is not the same as spending hour upon hour, day upon day, month upon month, year upon year practicing the learned procedural skill of surgery. You know the old saying: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”
So, what Carr is saying is that with the rise of automation we may start to see a reduction in procedural knowledge. Carr points to such things as airline pilots too dependent on autopilot systems (resulting in crashes) and doctors too dependent on medical information systems (resulting in deaths) as signposts on the road to environments of impoverished procedural knowledge. In his 2008 book entitled Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv bemoans the fact that medical schools are having a hard time training the next generation of doctors. Why? Because as kids many current medical students did not play outside spraying trees and rocks (and unsuspecting adults) with a garden hose. Medical educators cannot use the procedural knowledge “model” that a child learns playing with a garden hose to teach the hydraulic principles that govern a beating heart.
Yes, procedures are additive: early procedures can form the foundation upon which other procedures rest. My ability to ride a bicycle as a kid formed the foundation upon which my ability as an adult to ride a motorcycle rested. My water skiing and ice skating abilities (learned when I was nine or ten) both informed my ability to downhill ski (learned when I was age 13). Ice skating movements play a large role in both downhill and cross country skiing. And this brings up a central point concerning procedural knowledge: it is closely related to and tends to reside within the body. Although beyond the scope of this post, procedural knowledge is intimately tied up with such things as intuition and Ritual Man. For more on the demise of Ritual Man, see the resepctive works of mythologists Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly on the subject.
OK, how does the topic of procedures connect back to Bowlbian attachment theory? Well, many Bowlbian attachment theorists believe that early attachment relationships (if all goes well) do two central things simultaneously: develop procedures and develop the procedure-making apparatus. “Making procedures” is centrally caught up in the process of coordinating activities. Bowlby’s Inner Working Models share much in common with the idea of procedural knowledge, a topic, again, beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that early attachment relationships (if all goes well) both develop Inner Working Models and the cognitive model-making apparatus. Inner Working Models and the model-making apparatus form a dynamic feedback loop. In the same way, procedures and the procedure-making apparatus form a dynamic feedback loop. Remember how uncoordinated you felt learning any new procedure (like the youthful Carr above learning to drive a stick shift car). Simply put, procedures are about coordinating activities. To learn to play the guitar, you have to learn fingering on one hand, and strumming or picking on the other, and all of this while following a beat or a time. And if you are learning to read sheet music, that has to be brought into the overall system of coordination. Learning to write is to learn a procedure focused on coordinating eye, hand, and mind. The early attachment relationship is where the infant first experiences coordination: vision, motor skills, smell, emotions, taste, etc. The infant learns to play music if you will while reading the sheet music that would be mother (and later father). The infant goes through his or her forms of “jerks, stalls, squealing wheels, uncoordinated movements, grinding gears, and, yes, snickers from onlookers.” Sure, a toddler first learning to walk closely resembles a drunken sailor (sorry drunken sailors), but we know that there’s no way to get past the drunken sailor phase of coordination on the way to smooth, flowing movements.
As Carr points out in Glass Cage, we extend ourselves out into the environment by learning the procedures associated with a particular instrument (i.e., musical, surgical) or tool (i.e., sewing needle, carpenter’s saw). We extend our bodies out into the environment through the use of tools or instruments. Procedures form the bridge. Now, Carr (and he is not alone) believes that as we move into an era dominated by automation we are moving into an era where people are “using” instruments and tools but with greatly diminished “procedure bridges” if you will. As an example, airline pilots no longer fly the plane: they monitor the automated computer-servo systems that fly the plane. Increasingly, surgeons no longer perform surgery: they monitor the automated computer-servo systems that perform the surgical procedures. Stock market traders no longer make trades: they monitor the automated computer modeling systems that perform the trades. With automation, we are losing the procedure bridges that allow us to successfully extend body into the environment. As Carr talks about, soon we will no longer drive our own cars. We will sit passively as a computer-servo system (being principally developed by Google) drives for us. But Carr asks an important philosophical question: will self driving cars come with the ability to reason morally, to reason ethically? Will a self driving car risk harm to its occupants as it “thinks about” swerving to keep from hitting a child who has darted into the street to fetch a ball? Robust Inner Working Models are the inner cognitive models that allows us to run the mental “what if” or “as if” scenario (i.e., what if I swerve to avoid the young child in the street) that forms the basis of moral or ethical reasoning.
Can procedures go bad? Yes they can. Let me give you a tragic example. Back in my graduate school days, I completed a ground school that allowed me to make a static line parachute jump (talk about procedures). During this ground school, we were shown a video taken by a parachute jumper who had many thousands of jumps under his belt. The videographer was there to record a group jump where a number of jumpers join up (usually in the shape of a star or some such) before separating and pulling their ripcords. The video starts out with the videographer panning across the faces of the parachute jumpers getting ready to all jump out. Then you see a shot of the airplane from the outside. The shot is focused on the door. Clearly the videographer wanted to get a shot of the jumpers all coming out of the plane on their way toward their link up. Suddenly you see the camera bouncing all over the place as if carelessly thrown. It fact it was thrown. And the video tape survived. The videographer did not. He had jumped out of the plane without a parachute. As we were told in ground school, accidents happen more frequently than one might think with “high timers”—those with thousands of jumps. Why? Procedural knowledge takes over and the explicit thinking brain does not kick in to say, “Hey, careful, you’re not wearing a parachute.”
Let’s face it, army bootcamp is about teaching procedures that will keep a soldier safe while under fire. On the battlefield, soldiers must do and do quickly. As my father used to say (and he served during WWII), “If you have to think while under fire … you’re dead.” Military procedures are designed to keep the soldier safe while on the battlefield. However, these same military procedures may not work well in civilian life. Constantly scanning for enemy combatants is a great procedure for military life; not so great for civilian life. Kids who are subjected to early insecure attachments often learn “military procedures”: as adults they tend to constantly scan for enemy combatants. As I have blogged about before, adults with histories of insecure attachment are often able to spot and appropriately react to danger way before persons with histories of secure attachment.
Procedures form bridges linking persons and instruments within particular environments. Generally speaking military procedures link soldier to weapon within a battlefield environment. This may explain why many soldiers move to law enforcement as they reenter civilian life: the person, instrument, procedure bridge, environment system stays roughly the same. Problems start popping up when procedure bridges take us to places we do not expect. Insecure attachment procedures if you will allow the infant to survive, however, later in adulthood these same procedures can make forming intimate relationships difficult. And here’s the big bug-a-boo: procedures are hard to get at during talk therapy. This is why some therapists turn to experiential modalities that use therapeutic procedures such as ropes courses or outward bound experiences.
But wait, maybe a world without any procedures would be desirable. Maybe it would be a good thing if automation wrests procedure away from the hands of humans. There would be no more problems with procedure bridges leading us to the wrong place or operating within the wrong environment. And that’s happening already. Kids run auto-tune programs (like StarMaker) and are able to sing a song “like the star [they] are” (quoting the StarMaker page over at iTunes). Guitar Hero has fallen from grace but back in the day kids could push a few buttons on a plastic guitar and really think they knew how to play the guitar. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney recently bemoaned the fact that kids today listen to his music using the speakers that come with their smartphones. In essence, McCartney is offended that all of his years and years of procedure training and experience are being reduced within the Lo-Fi environment of smartphone speakers. Let’s face it, texting is a Lo-Fi form of communication. Sadly, kids are now texting and driving: a practice that in many ways is more dangerous than drinking and driving. The low procedure environment of texting simply does not mix with the high procedure environment of driving. Now, self driving cars and texting go hand-in-hand. Kids are texting and falling into open manholes. Even walking requires some procedural attention.
I applaud Carr’s efforts to draw attention to the very real possibility that our procedure environments are becoming impoverished. We have to ask ourselves, “Are procedure environments really that important?” Why not turn procedures over to automation systems? With Joni Mitchell playing in the background, know what you have before it’s gone. When we watch the Olympic games, we are watching and gaining delight from procedures. All of that would be gone. Pilots, gone. Surgeons, gone. Mothers and fathers, gone. Orchestras, gone. I’ll let you come up with your own examples. How do we stop the procedure erosion? Simply, be procedural. Ride a bike. Drive (or learn to drive) a stick shift car. Sew a dress. Write a letter in script using paper and pen. Swim. Play an instrument. I think you get the idea. Here’s a good one: when you have a question about something, ask a friend or go to the library for the answer. Resist the temptation to reduce your question to a simple Google search phrase like “procedural knowledge good.”
The Rise and Fall of Procedural Man (and Woman)
Nicholas Carr’s recent book entitled The Glass Cage: Automation and Us contains an interesting sub theme: The current rise of automation may mark the fall of Procedural Man. OK, who’s Procedural Man? Most of us are able to ride a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is a form of learned procedure. Once we have learned a procedure like bike riding, it tends to stay with us for life. Bike riding becomes natural or second nature. We will often say of a procedure—horseback riding, swimming, motorcycle riding, skiing, driving a stick shift car, sewing, playing an instrument, etc.—that once learned, “it’s just like riding a bike, it never goes away.” Carr starts out Glass Cage by talking about his days as a youth learning how to drive a stick shift car: the jerks, the stalls, the squealing wheels, the uncoordinated movements, the grinding gears, the snickers from onlookers. I haven’t driven a stick shift car in probably three years, however, I “know” that I can do it. This brings up an interesting property of learned procedures.
Learned procedures constitute a form of knowledge that is not explicit. Cognitive scientists will often refer to procedural knowledge as implicit knowledge. Carr uses the term tacit knowledge. My online dictionary defines tacit thus: Understood or implied without being stated. Explicit knowledge tends to be about objects; implicit knowledge tends to be about the “relationships” between objects. In order to “state” implicit or tacit knowledge, one has to actually do it: ride a bike, perform surgery, swim the breaststroke, ride a bike, ride a horse, drive a stick shift car, ski downhill, sew a dress, etc. Simply put, talking about downhill skiing (explicit knowledge) is not the same as actually doing it (implicit knowledge). Trust me, if you’re rolling into surgery and you spy your surgeon reading a copy of Surgery for Dummies, you are in big trouble. Reading about surgery is not the same as spending hour upon hour, day upon day, month upon month, year upon year practicing the learned procedural skill of surgery. You know the old saying: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”
So, what Carr is saying is that with the rise of automation we may start to see a reduction in procedural knowledge. Carr points to such things as airline pilots too dependent on autopilot systems (resulting in crashes) and doctors too dependent on medical information systems (resulting in deaths) as signposts on the road to environments of impoverished procedural knowledge. In his 2008 book entitled Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Richard Louv bemoans the fact that medical schools are having a hard time training the next generation of doctors. Why? Because as kids many current medical students did not play outside spraying trees and rocks (and unsuspecting adults) with a garden hose. Medical educators cannot use the procedural knowledge “model” that a child learns playing with a garden hose to teach the hydraulic principles that govern a beating heart.
Yes, procedures are additive: early procedures can form the foundation upon which other procedures rest. My ability to ride a bicycle as a kid formed the foundation upon which my ability as an adult to ride a motorcycle rested. My water skiing and ice skating abilities (learned when I was nine or ten) both informed my ability to downhill ski (learned when I was age 13). Ice skating movements play a large role in both downhill and cross country skiing. And this brings up a central point concerning procedural knowledge: it is closely related to and tends to reside within the body. Although beyond the scope of this post, procedural knowledge is intimately tied up with such things as intuition and Ritual Man. For more on the demise of Ritual Man, see the resepctive works of mythologists Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly on the subject.
OK, how does the topic of procedures connect back to Bowlbian attachment theory? Well, many Bowlbian attachment theorists believe that early attachment relationships (if all goes well) do two central things simultaneously: develop procedures and develop the procedure-making apparatus. “Making procedures” is centrally caught up in the process of coordinating activities. Bowlby’s Inner Working Models share much in common with the idea of procedural knowledge, a topic, again, beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that early attachment relationships (if all goes well) both develop Inner Working Models and the cognitive model-making apparatus. Inner Working Models and the model-making apparatus form a dynamic feedback loop. In the same way, procedures and the procedure-making apparatus form a dynamic feedback loop. Remember how uncoordinated you felt learning any new procedure (like the youthful Carr above learning to drive a stick shift car). Simply put, procedures are about coordinating activities. To learn to play the guitar, you have to learn fingering on one hand, and strumming or picking on the other, and all of this while following a beat or a time. And if you are learning to read sheet music, that has to be brought into the overall system of coordination. Learning to write is to learn a procedure focused on coordinating eye, hand, and mind. The early attachment relationship is where the infant first experiences coordination: vision, motor skills, smell, emotions, taste, etc. The infant learns to play music if you will while reading the sheet music that would be mother (and later father). The infant goes through his or her forms of “jerks, stalls, squealing wheels, uncoordinated movements, grinding gears, and, yes, snickers from onlookers.” Sure, a toddler first learning to walk closely resembles a drunken sailor (sorry drunken sailors), but we know that there’s no way to get past the drunken sailor phase of coordination on the way to smooth, flowing movements.
As Carr points out in Glass Cage, we extend ourselves out into the environment by learning the procedures associated with a particular instrument (i.e., musical, surgical) or tool (i.e., sewing needle, carpenter’s saw). We extend our bodies out into the environment through the use of tools or instruments. Procedures form the bridge. Now, Carr (and he is not alone) believes that as we move into an era dominated by automation we are moving into an era where people are “using” instruments and tools but with greatly diminished “procedure bridges” if you will. As an example, airline pilots no longer fly the plane: they monitor the automated computer-servo systems that fly the plane. Increasingly, surgeons no longer perform surgery: they monitor the automated computer-servo systems that perform the surgical procedures. Stock market traders no longer make trades: they monitor the automated computer modeling systems that perform the trades. With automation, we are losing the procedure bridges that allow us to successfully extend body into the environment. As Carr talks about, soon we will no longer drive our own cars. We will sit passively as a computer-servo system (being principally developed by Google) drives for us. But Carr asks an important philosophical question: will self driving cars come with the ability to reason morally, to reason ethically? Will a self driving car risk harm to its occupants as it “thinks about” swerving to keep from hitting a child who has darted into the street to fetch a ball? Robust Inner Working Models are the inner cognitive models that allows us to run the mental “what if” or “as if” scenario (i.e., what if I swerve to avoid the young child in the street) that forms the basis of moral or ethical reasoning.
Can procedures go bad? Yes they can. Let me give you a tragic example. Back in my graduate school days, I completed a ground school that allowed me to make a static line parachute jump (talk about procedures). During this ground school, we were shown a video taken by a parachute jumper who had many thousands of jumps under his belt. The videographer was there to record a group jump where a number of jumpers join up (usually in the shape of a star or some such) before separating and pulling their ripcords. The video starts out with the videographer panning across the faces of the parachute jumpers getting ready to all jump out. Then you see a shot of the airplane from the outside. The shot is focused on the door. Clearly the videographer wanted to get a shot of the jumpers all coming out of the plane on their way toward their link up. Suddenly you see the camera bouncing all over the place as if carelessly thrown. It fact it was thrown. And the video tape survived. The videographer did not. He had jumped out of the plane without a parachute. As we were told in ground school, accidents happen more frequently than one might think with “high timers”—those with thousands of jumps. Why? Procedural knowledge takes over and the explicit thinking brain does not kick in to say, “Hey, careful, you’re not wearing a parachute.”
Let’s face it, army bootcamp is about teaching procedures that will keep a soldier safe while under fire. On the battlefield, soldiers must do and do quickly. As my father used to say (and he served during WWII), “If you have to think while under fire … you’re dead.” Military procedures are designed to keep the soldier safe while on the battlefield. However, these same military procedures may not work well in civilian life. Constantly scanning for enemy combatants is a great procedure for military life; not so great for civilian life. Kids who are subjected to early insecure attachments often learn “military procedures”: as adults they tend to constantly scan for enemy combatants. As I have blogged about before, adults with histories of insecure attachment are often able to spot and appropriately react to danger way before persons with histories of secure attachment.
Procedures form bridges linking persons and instruments within particular environments. Generally speaking military procedures link soldier to weapon within a battlefield environment. This may explain why many soldiers move to law enforcement as they reenter civilian life: the person, instrument, procedure bridge, environment system stays roughly the same. Problems start popping up when procedure bridges take us to places we do not expect. Insecure attachment procedures if you will allow the infant to survive, however, later in adulthood these same procedures can make forming intimate relationships difficult. And here’s the big bug-a-boo: procedures are hard to get at during talk therapy. This is why some therapists turn to experiential modalities that use therapeutic procedures such as ropes courses or outward bound experiences.
But wait, maybe a world without any procedures would be desirable. Maybe it would be a good thing if automation wrests procedure away from the hands of humans. There would be no more problems with procedure bridges leading us to the wrong place or operating within the wrong environment. And that’s happening already. Kids run auto-tune programs (like StarMaker) and are able to sing a song “like the star [they] are” (quoting the StarMaker page over at iTunes). Guitar Hero has fallen from grace but back in the day kids could push a few buttons on a plastic guitar and really think they knew how to play the guitar. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney recently bemoaned the fact that kids today listen to his music using the speakers that come with their smartphones. In essence, McCartney is offended that all of his years and years of procedure training and experience are being reduced within the Lo-Fi environment of smartphone speakers. Let’s face it, texting is a Lo-Fi form of communication. Sadly, kids are now texting and driving: a practice that in many ways is more dangerous than drinking and driving. The low procedure environment of texting simply does not mix with the high procedure environment of driving. Now, self driving cars and texting go hand-in-hand. Kids are texting and falling into open manholes. Even walking requires some procedural attention.
I applaud Carr’s efforts to draw attention to the very real possibility that our procedure environments are becoming impoverished. We have to ask ourselves, “Are procedure environments really that important?” Why not turn procedures over to automation systems? With Joni Mitchell playing in the background, know what you have before it’s gone. When we watch the Olympic games, we are watching and gaining delight from procedures. All of that would be gone. Pilots, gone. Surgeons, gone. Mothers and fathers, gone. Orchestras, gone. I’ll let you come up with your own examples. How do we stop the procedure erosion? Simply, be procedural. Ride a bike. Drive (or learn to drive) a stick shift car. Sew a dress. Write a letter in script using paper and pen. Swim. Play an instrument. I think you get the idea. Here’s a good one: when you have a question about something, ask a friend or go to the library for the answer. Resist the temptation to reduce your question to a simple Google search phrase like “procedural knowledge good.”