In The Glass Cage, best-selling author Nicholas Carr digs behind the headlines about factory robots and self-driving cars, wearable computers and digitized medicine, as he explores the hidden costs of granting software dominion over our work and our leisure and reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.

In this compilation from the past decade, Carr presents a selection of nearly 80 posts from his Rough Type blog, several magazine articles and book excerpts, and an original essay on transhumanism. It is easy to trace his technoskepticism through these writings and the warnings that as technology is being sold with utopian zeal, people are often blinded to the business interests that are quietly reshaping our culture and values. He urges readers to...