A Bluetooth Tracking Device That Fits in Your Wallet

As reported by Tuaw: It appears that 2013 is the year of the Bluetooth tracker. We've covered the nio Tag and Kensington Proximo Fob Key and Phone Finder in the past two weeks; now comes word of a remarkably thin Bluetooth tracking device from Find'em Tracking. The Find'em Tracking Cards (pre-order now, one for $24.99USD, two for $44.99USD) are the thickness of two credit cards placed back to back, have an 18-month battery life, and work hand-in-hand with an iOS app for instant tracking of valuables.

The Find'em Tracking Cards can let you know the minute your iOS device and the card are out of range (from 10 to 150 feet) of each other. There's a button on the card to make your phone ring if you've lost it.

The app provides a "tracking radar" to advise you on how far away you are from one of the Tracking Cards, and if you're out of range or didn't hear an alert, the app will show you on an integrated map exactly where the two devices -- iPhone and Tracking Card -- were last talking to each other.

There's a special feature of the Find'em Tracking Cards -- pop them in your luggage, and you'll know exactly when your luggage is delivered onto the carousel at the airport for easy pickup. The cards are definitely less expensive than the other options we've looked at, and the app will be available in English, Spanish, Russian and French.

Trucking: Ghost Logs and Hacking Could Haunt the EOBR Mandate

All American truckers will soon transmit a swarm of data on
their performance.  Proponents claim it will make the roads safer
but some wonder what else the data could be used for.

As reported by The Atlantic: Because his truck is fitted with a refrigerator unit, Dick Pingel often hauls food: usually sausage or cheese, products long associated with his home state, Wisconsin. He’s been a professional trucker for 30 years, covered over three and a half million miles, and never had a single chargeable accident.

“One of the reasons that most of us came out here, myself included,” he explains, “was because of the independence. After the Vietnam War, a lot of vets came out here. It was probably because they didn't want somebody peering over their shoulder all the time.”

But Pingel, along with more than three million of his fellow truckers in the United States, is facing a regulatory upheaval which will cost his industry an estimated $2 billion and fundamentally change the way he does his job. Over the next few years, it will become mandatory, by law, for all American truckers to carry a tracking device, an electronic on-board recorder (EOBR), in their vehicle. And Pingel isn't happy about it.

Truckers are on the forefront of workplace surveillance. With the availability of cheap sensors and hyper-competitive companies seeking to maximize their profits, any human action done on the clock may become subject to increased scrutiny and what will probably be called optimization. If you want to see the future of work, take a look at IBM’s efforts around call center workers or the battle over electronic armbands at Tesco in Ireland. It’s not that data hasn't always been used in corporate decision-making, it’s that it’s possible to capture so much more now. With more data, comes more control.

There are hundreds of different types of EOBR (or ELD), and they vary greatly in terms of cost and capability. In order to comply with the incoming federal mandate, however, they all have to track when a truck’s engine is running, record its duty status and ensure that drivers aren't working for more than 14 consecutive hours, including a maximum of 11 actual driving hours within that window.

The idea is to make “Hours of Service” log-keeping, which drivers are already required to do manually, more accurate. It’s also an attempt to reduce crashes. A 2006 government survey suggested that around 13% of accidents are fatigue-related and there’s no doubt that road haulage is a dangerous industry. In fact, it’s one of the most dangerous in America.

Preliminary figures from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in 2011, 656 Americans died while operating tractor-trailers or heavy trucks. Thousands more other drivers, passengers and pedestrians are killed in accidents involving large professional vehicles every year.

For Pingel, though, the EOBR won’t provide any obvious benefits. “They’re forcing me to put something in that’s not gonna help me any,” he says. “And they keep saying, ‘Well, it saves you time…’ You know, I can do a lot. I can write up a log book in the same amount of time that it takes me to program what I’m doing into the EOBR.”

He’s been testing one model in preparation for the mandate coming into force. For one thing, he says the graphical display, which gradually turns from green to red as he uses up his allowed time on the road, creates an unnecessary sense of urgency that makes the last hour of his run feel more stressful than it did before.

Pingel has specifically chosen his EOBR for its simplicity and low cost to try and minimize its impact on him. However, there are many competing devices on the market which can gather much more detailed information on speed, engine revving, hard-braking and fuel efficiency.

This data is often centrally monitored by carrier control rooms in real time. With the prospect of a mandate on the horizon, many other tech firms have seized on the opportunity to profit. 

It’s not an entirely new concept. Rather, it’s a 21st Century version of devices like the 1911 Jones Recorder. An early example of a tachograph designed for use in road vehicles, the Jones Recorder was heavily marketed across Europe and America in newspaper and magazine advertisements. These claimed that business owners who relied on a fleet of delivery vehicles would, for the first time, be able to accurately track the number of stops drivers made, check what speed they had traveled at and know how many miles they covered. It was, boasted the tagline, “A constant check on the driver.”

Among truckers, EOBRs are sometimes derided as “baby sitters” and there is some resentment towards the growing emphasis on data-informed hiring practices within the industry. Many are aware that a record which shows a trucker is slightly harder on fuel thanks to the way he revs, idles, and brakes could mean that he won’t get a job in an increasingly competitive market. The nominal rationale may be to increase safety, but as Pingel puts it, “it’s all turned into bottom line.”

Fears that trucking companies could misuse their expanded awareness of where their drivers are and what they are doing have already been expressed in court. In 2011, the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), of which Pingel is a long-term member, launched a lawsuit against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the authority responsible for drafting the rule.

OOIDA complained that there was a risk of driver harassment, in which carriers, cognizant that a trucker is running out of time to complete his delivery, might goad him or her into getting back on the road when it’s not safe to do so. Fatigue, inclement weather, or traffic problems could all be ignored for the sake of the time sheet.

For Todd Spencer, Executive Vice President of OOIDA, it was a clear threat to driver safety. “These are the kinds of decisions that experienced, professional drivers have to make every day,” he comments. “These are safety decisions. Technology can’t take the place of sound judgement.”

With a strong legal case and testimonies from truckers who claimed that this had already happened to them, OOIDA won their suit and the mandate was vacated for redrafting. The latest version still hasn't been authorized and published, though it’s expected before the end of the year. Most observers believe the final rule will be enforceable on American highways by 2015. Truckers who haven’t yet implemented an EOBR are therefore living in the twilight of an era when driving without one can be described as legal.

But in many areas, the road haulage industry has already been modernizing itself through such technology. Danny Knapp of Illinois has had a commercial driver’s license since 1998. Over the years he’s hauled livestock, liquid commodities like fertilizer and produce such as corn. He says that trucking has never had an especially positive public image but that truckers, once portrayed as cowboys in the 1978 Sam Peckinpah film Convoy, have long been trying to clean up their image.

“Most drivers want to be safe,” he explains. “The outlaw types used to be cool, even heroes, but now we kind of alienate them.” He recalls hearing stories about “truckers’ tooth-picks” – tooth-picks dipped in liquid speed and chewed.

But could truckers regain their edginess by evolving into a new breed of hacker? Traditionally, log book “fudging”, where duty records were falsified in some way, was understood to be common. It was at least prevalent enough to be romanticized in popular songs like Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” which cheerfully references several other stereotypical trucking misdemeanors.

A hacked EOBR system playing solitaire.

Some old habits die hard, according to Karen Levy, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton. Levy has been researching the impact of EOBRs in the trucking industry and says that many drivers are already experimenting with hacks and methods of tampering.

“Truckers are a particularly savvy and motivated bunch,” she says. “Some drivers have figured out how to temporarily disconnect certain EOBR models from the truck, or to otherwise block their signals so they can't record data. Another approach is to drive using multiple driver ID numbers which are sometimes called ‘ghost logs.’”

There’s even a YouTube video showing how an EOBR can be hacked to play games, and Danny Knapp, although he’s not tried it himself, says he can imagine a future where shady individuals at truck stops offer to tamper with on-board recorders for a small fee, just like they offer to remove speed limiters and increase horsepower today.

Companies, too, might have an incentive to surreptitiously add “extra” hours to a driver’s electronic log so they can complete a delivery without running out of time. Dick Pingel says he’s heard stories like this already from drivers he’s met on the job.

Nevertheless, the trucking industry is gradually falling into line with the idea of mandated electronic recorders. Many of the bigger carriers have made a vigorous effort to adapt early and absorb the cost of implementing EOBRs across their fleet as soon as possible. Thomas Scollard, Vice President of Dedicated Contract Carriage Services for Penske Logistics confirms that the devices have improved planning and saved on huge amounts of paperwork.

As many might suspect, Penske’s stature has not been irrelevant here. “We’re fortunate that, the size we are, we can look at something like this, put some resources against it and say, OK, how do we make this work for us in a positive way?” explains Scollard.

But there are plenty of independents who see new technology as an opportunity too. Cliff Downing, of Iowa, is one of them. Like Dick Pingel, he’s been on the road for three decades, but unlike Pingel, he’s embraced the EOBR with gusto, and even claims that it’s benefited him financially.

“My gross revenues have been up year over year each year since using electronic logs,” he says. “Now is it due to electronic logs? Not the machine itself, it’s the efficiency that’s been forced onto us by the machine.”

A trucker who, by his own account has, “pulled just about everything there is to pull,” Downing provides several arguments about making the most of the technology at his disposal. For example, he carefully modified his brand new truck with a tuned-up, slightly older engine, to guarantee that it would run at almost two gallons more to the mile than the industry average, saving him thousands of dollars in fuel each year.

Like his vehicle, Downing has streamlined his business over the years. He likes to operate within a specific 5-600 mile radius and relies on a list of reliable customers who ship loads such as bulk oatmeal and coiled steel for use in manufacturing.

He says people who complain about the EOBR mandate are simply expressing an innate but unhelpful resistance to change. After all, in Europe, simpler electronic tachographs have been mandatory since the 1970s. And for him, the digital recorder has been a boon. “If I need a log for an officer alongside the road, it’s kind of like… how do ya want it? Do you want me to fax it to you? Here, I can show you on my smartphone! Oh hey, I can open up my Macbook Air, you can look at it on my laptop,” he explains. “You take your pick Mr Cop, I’ll show you any way you want.”

Downing, who has degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Alaska, perhaps gets some of his resilience from the military, being a veteran who saw action in Korea and the evacuation of Vietnam.

Later, he quit working for the government because he longed for greater independence. “I worked better in a ‘nobody-hassling-me’ kind of environment,” he says, before describing his subsequent life as an “ice road trucker” in Alaska, where existence was “frontiersy” and where planning for harsh conditions and break-down was something your life depended on.

The same strategic planning now manifests itself in Downing’s adoption of the EOBR. “I modified my operation to make it work,” he says. “As much as the libertarian in me says no to mandates, they’re coming. You might as well just wake up, face it, and deal with it.”

Trucking is a very big industry, with a diverse range of people in it. Some of them distrust the rise of electronic logging while others have seized upon it. None of the truckers I interviewed discounted the importance of autonomy, however. When I asked Danny Knapp why he liked the job he said this: “It’s just a unique feeling to get on the interstate, riding on top of this 80,000 pound machine and driving 65 miles an hour. When I do it I feel calm and I feel free. I can’t explain it any further than that.

“Maybe it’s something about leaving. You know, we’re always leaving some place. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s a very free feeling to me.”

Technology might disrupt that, but then again it might not. Knapp, for one, is not opposed to the mandate. Trucking, as well as being big, is also a competitive industry and businesses are constantly looking for ways of understanding their operations in more detail.

Today, OOIDA says it is not currently planning any further legal challenges against the FMCSA, whose rule-making is nearly complete. Everything now falls to the truckers. As technology encroaches they seem determined, one way or another, to retain their professional independence, the spirit of the open road. 

CIA Wary of Russian GNSS/GPS Correction Stations in the USA

A technician from Russia's space agency at a monitor station
that opened in Brazil recently.

As reported by the New York Times: In recent months, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon have been quietly waging a campaign to stop the State Department from allowing Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to build about half a dozen of these structures, known as monitor stations, on United States soil, several American officials said.

They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry, the officials said. These monitor stations, the Russians contend, would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of Moscow’s version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers guided missiles to their targets and thirsty smartphone users to the nearest Starbucks.

“They don’t want to be reliant on the American system and believe that their systems, like GPS, will spawn other industries and applications,” said a former senior official in the State Department’s Office of Space and Advanced Technology. “They feel as though they are losing a technological edge to us in an important market. Look at everything GPS has done on things like your phone and the movement of planes and ships.”

The Russian effort is part of a larger global race by several countries — including China and European Union nations — to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS.

For the State Department, permitting Russia to build the stations would help mend the Obama administration’s relationship with the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, now at a nadir because of Moscow’s granting asylum to Mr. Snowden and its backing of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

A new GLONASS station in Brazil - similar
to what Russia would like to setup in the
USA.

But the C.I.A. and other American spy agencies, as well as the Pentagon, suspect that the monitor stations would give the Russians a foothold on American territory that would sharpen the accuracy of Moscow’s satellite-steered weapons. The stations, they believe, could also give the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders.

The squabble is serious enough that administration officials have delayed a final decision until the Russians provide more information and until the American agencies sort out their differences, State Department and White House officials said.

Russia’s efforts have also stirred concerns on Capitol Hill, where members of the intelligence and armed services committees view Moscow’s global positioning network — known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System — with deep suspicion and are demanding answers from the administration.

“I would like to understand why the United States would be interested in enabling a GPS competitor, like Russian Glonass, when the world’s reliance on GPS is a clear advantage to the United States on multiple levels,” said Representative Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama, the chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee.

Mr. Rogers last week asked the Pentagon to provide an assessment of the proposal’s impact on national security. The request was made in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.

The monitor stations have been a high priority of Mr. Putin for several years as a means to improve Glonass not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.

Earlier this year, Russia positioned a station in Brazil, and agreements with Spain, Indonesia and Australia are expected soon, according to Russian news reports. The United States has stations around the world, but none in Russia.

Several chip manufacturers are already beginning to offer chipsets that combine the ability to receive satellite based position information from multiple signals, such as the USA GPS system, Europe's Galileo system, the Russian Glonass system and Japan's QZSS.

New Algorithms Can Tell if You Ride the Bus or Train, or How Bad You Drive

As reported by GigaOm: Researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland have developed algorithms they say are the best yet for determining how mobile phone users are getting around town - walking, driving, taking the subway or otherwise - by analyzing the frequency and velocity of their starts and stops.

Paired with location data, this could be great news for civic planners trying to optimize roads or public transportation.  As the researcher's suggest, it could also be helpful in reconstructing accidents or identifying road hazards, or powering an app that gives feedback about a user's driving style in the name of improving safety or fuel efficiency.

It's arguable the latter capability is better suited for the car's internal sensor network and display system, though. for starters, cars can gather much more fine-grained data about a vehicle's operation than just braking and acceleration patterns.  And should such a system turn into a glorified, digital backseat driver, a car-based system is much less likely to be thrown out the window.

NASA: PhoneSat 2.4 is Ready for Launch

As reported by NASA: For the second time this year, NASA is preparing to send a smartphone-controlled small spacecraft into orbit. The PhoneSat 2.4 mission is demonstrating innovative new approaches for small spacecraft technologies of the future.

The NASA PhoneSat 2.4 is hitch-hiking a ride onboard an Orbital Minotaur I rocket slated for a November 19 liftoff from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The primary payload on the booster is the U.S. Air Force Office of Responsive Space ORS-3 mission, which will validate launch and range improvements for NASA and the military.

PhoneSat 2.4 builds upon the successful flights of a trio of NASA smartphone satellites that were orbited together last April. That pioneering mission gauged use of consumer-grade smartphone technology as the main control electronics of a capable, yet very low-cost, satellite, reports Andrew Petro, program executive for small spacecraft technology at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Each smartphone is housed in a standard cubesat structure, measuring roughly four inches square.

The soon-to-be lofted PhoneSat 2.4 has two-way radio communications capability, along with reaction wheels to provide attitude control, Petro says, and will be placed into a much higher orbit than its PhoneSat predecessors. Those were short-lived, operating for about a week in orbit.

Tabletop technology

“We’re taking PhoneSat to another step in terms of capability, along with seeing if the satellite continues to function for an extended period of time,” Petro explains.

The PhoneSat mission is a technology demonstration project developed through the agency’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program, part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

NASA PhoneSats take advantage of “off-the-shelf” consumer devices that already have many of the systems needed for a spacecraft, but are ultra-small, such as fast processors, multipurpose operating systems, sensors, GPS receivers, and high-resolution cameras.

“It’s tabletop technology,” Petro says. “The size of a PhoneSat makes a big difference. You don’t need a building, just a room. Everything you need to do becomes easier and more portable. The scale of things just makes everything, in many ways, easier. It really unleashes a lot of opportunity for innovation,” he says.

Consumer electronics market

There’s another interesting aspect to using the smartphone as a basic electronic package for PhoneSats.

“The technology of the consumer electronics market is going to continue to advance,” Petro notes. “NASA can pick up on those advances that are driven by the needs of the consumer.”

What’s the big deal about small satellites?

NASA is eyeing use of small, low-cost, powerful satellites for atmospheric or Earth science, communications, or other space-born applications.

For example, work is already underway on the Edison Demonstration of Smallsat Networks (EDSN) mission, says Petro. The EDSN effort consists of a loose formation of eight identical cubesats in orbit, each able to cross-link communicate with each other to perform space weather monitoring duties.

Magic dust

The three PhoneSats that were orbited earlier this year signaled “the first baby step,” says Bruce Yost, the program manager for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

“The PhoneSat 2.4 will be at a higher altitude and stay in space for a couple of years before reentering,” Yost adds. “So we’ll be able to start collecting data on the radiation effects on the satellite and see if we run into anything that causes problems.”

Yost says where the real “magic dust” of PhoneSats comes into play is how you program them. “That is, what applications can you run on them to make them useful. We’re adding more and more complexity into the PhoneSats.”

To that end, PhoneSats and the applications they are imbued with can lead to new ways to interact with and explore space, Yost observes. “You can approach problems in a more distributed fashion. So it’s an architectural shift, the concept of inexpensive but lots of small probes.”

NASA’s Petro sees another value in pushing forward on small satellites.

“It used to be that kids growing up wanted to be an astronaut. I think we might be seeing kids saying, what they want to do is build a spacecraft. The idea here is that they really can do that,” Petro says. “They can get together with a few other people to build and fly a spacecraft. Some students coming out of college as new hires have already built and flown a satellite…that’s a whole new notion, one that was not possible even 10 years ago,” he concludes.

Smartphones in 2017 will be Smart Enough to Automate and Manage Your Daily Life

Starting from certain basic tasks, smartphones are expected to
control greater aspects of our lives.

As reported by IBM Times: Over the next four years, smartphones will become so intelligent that they will be able to predict their owners' next move, their next purchase or even interpret their actions, according to a new Gartner report, which says that smartphones will be able to perform such tasks using what has been described as “the next step in personal cloud computing.”

“Smartphones are becoming smarter, and will be smarter than you by 2017,” Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Tuesday at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013, which is taking place in Barcelona, Spain, from Nov. 10-14. “If there is heavy traffic, it will wake you up early for a meeting with your boss, or simply send an apology if it is a meeting with your colleague. The smartphone will gather contextual information from its calendar, its sensors, the user’s location and personal data.”

According to Milanesi, the transition from mobile phones to smartphones is attributed to two main factors -- technology and apps. While the former is responsible for features such as cameras, location-based intelligence and sensors, the latter has connected such features to an array of sophisticated functions that have improved users’ daily lives.

Initially, smartphones are expected to perform basic tasks, such as booking a car for its yearly service, creating a weekly to-do list, sending birthday greetings or responding to everyday emails. However, as consumers become more confident about their smartphone's ability to perform certain menial tasks, they are expected to begin allowing more apps and services to take control of other, more crucial, aspects of their lives, which according to analysts, “will be the era of cognizant computing.”

However, it maybe a while before smartphones will be ready to take over the planet from humans.

Milanesi said that smartphones will be smarter than what they are now not because of inherent intelligence, but because the data stored in the cloud will provide them with the computational ability to make sense of the information they have. Smartphones will have the potential to become consumers’ “secret digital agent,” but only if users are willing to provide them with the data.

According to Gartner, regulatory and privacy issues, and the level of comfort users will have in sharing their personal information, will differ considerably based on age groups and geographies. Here’s a figure, showing the four stages of cognizant computing:

The four stages of cognizant computing.

According to Gartner, cognizant computing will have significant impact on hardware vendors, and other services and business models, and over the next two to five years, it will become one of the strongest market forces affecting the entire technological ecosystem.

“Over the next five years, the data that is available about us, our likes and dislikes, our environment and relationships will be used by our devices to grow their relevance and ultimately improve our life,” Milanesi said.

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting ALL of Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design
our buildings, audit our businesses.  That's all well and good.  But
what happens when the computer fails?

As reported by The Atlantic: On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New York. As is typical of commercial flights today, the pilots didn’t have all that much to do during the hour-long trip. The captain, Marvin Renslow, manned the controls briefly during takeoff, guiding the Bombardier Q400 turboprop into the air, then switched on the autopilot and let the software do the flying. He and his co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, chatted—about their families, their careers, the personalities of air-traffic controllers—as the plane cruised uneventfully along its northwesterly route at 16,000 feet. The Q400 was well into its approach to the Buffalo airport, its landing gear down, its wing flaps out, when the pilot’s control yoke began to shudder noisily, a signal that the plane was losing lift and risked going into an aerodynamic stall. The autopilot disconnected, and the captain took over the controls. He reacted quickly, but he did precisely the wrong thing: he jerked back on the yoke, lifting the plane’s nose and reducing its airspeed, instead of pushing the yoke forward to gain velocity. Rather than preventing a stall, Renslow’s action caused one. The plane spun out of control, then plummeted. “We’re down,” the captain said, just before the Q400 slammed into a house in a Buffalo suburb.

The crash, which killed all 49 people on board as well as one person on the ground, should never have happened. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation concluded that the cause of the accident was pilot error. The captain’s response to the stall warning, the investigators reported, “should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training” and instead revealed “startle and confusion.” An executive from the company that operated the flight, the regional carrier Colgan Air, admitted that the pilots seemed to lack “situational awareness” as the emergency unfolded.

The Buffalo crash was not an isolated incident. An eerily similar disaster, with far more casualties, occurred a few months later. On the night of May 31, an Air France Airbus A330 took off from Rio de Janeiro, bound for Paris. The jumbo jet ran into a storm over the Atlantic about three hours after takeoff. Its air-speed sensors, coated with ice, began giving faulty readings, causing the autopilot to disengage. Bewildered, the pilot flying the plane, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, yanked back on the stick. The plane rose and a stall warning sounded, but he continued to pull back heedlessly. As the plane climbed sharply, it lost velocity. The airspeed sensors began working again, providing the crew with accurate numbers. Yet Bonin continued to slow the plane. The jet stalled and began to fall. If he had simply let go of the control, the A330 would likely have righted itself. But he didn’t. The plane dropped 35,000 feet in three minutes before hitting the ocean. All 228 passengers and crew members died.

Pilots today work inside what they call “glass cockpits.” The old analog dials and gauges are mostly gone.

They’ve been replaced by banks of digital displays. Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes. What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.

And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes, leading to what Jan Noyes, an ergonomics expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, terms “a de-skilling of the crew.” No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of “a spectacularly new type of accident,” says Raja Parasuraman, a psychology professor at George Mason University and a leading authority on automation. When an autopilot system fails, too many pilots, thrust abruptly into what has become a rare role, make mistakes. Rory Kay, a veteran United captain who has served as the top safety official of the Air Line Pilots Association, put the problem bluntly in a 2011 interview with the Associated Press: “We’re forgetting how to fly.” The Federal Aviation Administration has become so concerned that in January it issued a “safety alert” to airlines, urging them to get their pilots to do more manual flying. An overreliance on automation, the agency warned, could put planes and passengers at risk.

Doctors use computers to make diagnoses and to perform surgery. Wall Street bankers use them to assemble and trade financial instruments. Architects use them to design buildings. Attorneys use them in document discovery. And it’s not only professional work that’s being computerized. Thanks to smartphones and other small, affordable computers, we depend on software to carry out many of our everyday routines. We launch apps to aid us in shopping, cooking, socializing, even raising our kids. We follow turn-by-turn GPS instructions. We seek advice from recommendation engines on what to watch, read, and listen to. We call on Google, or Siri, to answer our questions and solve our problems. More and more, at work and at leisure, we’re living our lives inside glass cockpits.

Psychologists have found that when we work with computers, we often fall victim to two cognitive ailments—complacency and bias—that can undercut our performance and lead to mistakes. Automation complacency occurs when a computer lulls us into a false sense of security. Confident that the machine will work flawlessly and handle any problem that crops up, we allow our attention to drift. We become disengaged from our work, and our awareness of what’s going on around us fades. Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our own eyes and ears. When a computer provides incorrect or insufficient data, we remain oblivious to the error.

What’s most astonishing, and unsettling, about computer automation is that it’s still in its early stages. Experts used to assume that there were limits to the ability of programmers to automate complicated tasks, particularly those involving sensory perception, pattern recognition, and conceptual knowledge. They pointed to the example of driving a car, which requires not only the instantaneous interpretation of a welter of visual signals but also the ability to adapt seamlessly to unanticipated situations. “Executing a left turn across oncoming traffic,” two prominent economists wrote in 2004, “involves so many factors that it is hard to imagine the set of rules that can replicate a driver’s behavior.” Just six years later, in October 2010, Google announced that it had built a fleet of seven “self-driving cars,” which had already logged more than 140,000 miles on roads in California and Nevada.

Driverless cars provide a preview of how robots will be able to navigate and perform work in the physical world, taking over activities requiring environmental awareness, coordinated motion, and fluid decision making. Equally rapid progress is being made in automating cerebral tasks. Just a few years ago, the idea of a computer competing on a game show like Jeopardy would have seemed laughable, but in a celebrated match in 2011, the IBM supercomputer Watson trounced Jeopardy’s all-time champion, Ken Jennings. Watson doesn’t think the way people think; it has no understanding of what it’s doing or saying. Its advantage lies in the extraordinary speed of modern computer processors.

In Race Against the Machine, a 2011 e-book on the economic implications of computerization, the MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that Google’s driverless car and IBM’s Watson are examples of a new wave of automation that, drawing on the “exponential growth” in computer power, will change the nature of work in virtually every job and profession. Today, they write, “computers improve so quickly that their capabilities pass from the realm of science fiction into the everyday world not over the course of a human lifetime, or even within the span of a professional’s career, but instead in just a few years.”

In a classic 1983 article in the journal Automatica, Lisanne Bainbridge, an engineering psychologist at University College London, described a conundrum of computer automation. Because many system designers assume that human operators are “unreliable and inefficient,” at least when compared with a computer, they strive to give the operators as small a role as possible. People end up functioning as mere monitors, passive watchers of screens. That’s a job that humans, with our notoriously wandering minds, are especially bad at. Research on vigilance, dating back to studies of radar operators during World War II, shows that people have trouble maintaining their attention on a stable display of information for more than half an hour. “This means,” Bainbridge observed, “that it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities.” And because a person’s skills “deteriorate when they are not used,” even an experienced operator will eventually begin to act like an inexperienced one if restricted to just watching. The lack of awareness and the degradation of know-how raise the odds that when something goes wrong, the operator will react ineptly. The assumption that the human will be the weakest link in the system becomes self-fulfilling.

Psychologists have discovered some simple ways to temper automation’s ill effects. You can program software to shift control back to human operators at frequent but irregular intervals; knowing that they may need to take command at any moment keeps people engaged, promoting situational awareness and learning. You can put limits on the scope of automation, making sure that people working with computers perform challenging tasks rather than merely observing. Giving people more to do helps sustain the generation effect. You can incorporate educational routines into software, requiring users to repeat difficult manual and mental tasks that encourage memory formation and skill building.

Some software writers take such suggestions to heart. In schools, the best instructional programs help students master a subject by encouraging attentiveness, demanding hard work, and reinforcing learned skills through repetition. Their design reflects the latest discoveries about how our brains store memories and weave them into conceptual knowledge and practical know-how. But most software applications don’t foster learning and engagement. In fact, they have the opposite effect. That’s because taking the steps necessary to promote the development and maintenance of expertise almost always entails a sacrifice of speed and productivity. Learning requires inefficiency. Businesses, which seek to maximize productivity and profit, would rarely accept such a trade-off. Individuals, too, almost always seek efficiency and convenience. We pick the program that lightens our load, not the one that makes us work harder and longer. Abstract concerns about the fate of human talent can’t compete with the allure of saving time and money.

The small island of Igloolik, off the coast of the Melville Peninsula in the Nunavut territory of northern Canada, is a bewildering place in the winter. The average temperature hovers at about 20 degrees below zero, thick sheets of sea ice cover the surrounding waters, and the sun is rarely seen. Despite the brutal conditions, Inuit hunters have for some 4,000 years ventured out from their homes on the island and traveled across miles of ice and tundra to search for game. The hunters’ ability to navigate vast stretches of the barren Arctic terrain, where landmarks are few, snow formations are in constant flux, and trails disappear overnight, has amazed explorers and scientists for centuries. The Inuit’s extraordinary way-finding skills are born not of technological prowess—they long eschewed maps and compasses—but of a profound understanding of winds, snowdrift patterns, animal behavior, stars, and tides.

Inuit culture is changing now. The Igloolik hunters have begun to rely on computer-generated maps to get around. Adoption of GPS technology has been particularly strong among younger Inuit, and it’s not hard to understand why. The ease and convenience of automated navigation makes the traditional Inuit techniques seem archaic and cumbersome.

But as GPS devices have proliferated on Igloolik, reports of serious accidents during hunts have spread. A hunter who hasn't developed way-finding skills can easily become lost, particularly if his GPS receiver fails. The routes so meticulously plotted on satellite maps can also give hunters tunnel vision, leading them onto thin ice or into other hazards a skilled navigator would avoid. The anthropologist Claudio Aporta, of Carleton University in Ottawa, has been studying Inuit hunters for more than 15 years. He notes that while satellite navigation offers practical advantages, its adoption has already brought a deterioration in way-finding abilities and, more generally, a weakened feel for the land. An Inuit on a GPS-equipped snowmobile is not so different from a suburban commuter in a GPS-equipped SUV: as he devotes his attention to the instructions coming from the computer, he loses sight of his surroundings. He travels “blindfolded,” as Aporta puts it. A unique talent that has distinguished a people for centuries may evaporate in a generation.

Whether it’s a pilot on a flight deck, a doctor in an examination room, or an Inuit hunter on an ice floe, knowing demands doing. One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a difficult task, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but it’s the work itself—the means—that makes us who we are. Computer automation severs the ends from the means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face an existential question: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? If we don’t grapple with that question ourselves, our gadgets will be happy to answer it for us.