New York’s famous 92nd Street Y returns to Sedona on Tuesday, Sept. 30 when the Sedona International Film Festival hosts “The Glass Cage” featuring bestselling author Nicholas Carr in a conversation with Tim Wu. The event will take place at 5:15 p.m. at the festival’s Mary D. Fisher Theatre, live as it is happening in New York.
What kind of world are we building for ourselves? That’s the question bestselling author Nicholas Carr tackles in his urgent new book and the evening’s conversation: The Glass Cage, about the human consequences of automation.
Digging behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, Carr explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure. Even as they bring ease to our lives, computer programs are stealing something essential from us. Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly people’s happiness and satisfaction are tied to performing meaningful work in the real world, Carr reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.
From nineteenth-century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the sterile landscapes of GPS maps, Carr explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective, examining the personal as well as the economic consequences of our growing dependence on computers.
Join Carr as he discusses this increasingly crucial topic with public advocate and Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, who developed the highly-influential Net Neutrality theory.
Nicholas Carr writes about technology and culture. His most recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of two other influential books, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008) and Does IT Matter? (2004). His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia Law School. He is also a fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he wires also about private power, free speech, copyright and antitrust.