QUOTE : He didn’t just fly an airplane,” a fellow pilot once said of Wiley Post; “he put it on.” 42 Today’s pilots don’t wear their planes. They wear their planes’ computers—or perhaps the computers wear the pilots. The transformation that aviation has gone through over the last few decades—the shift from mechanical to digital systems, the proliferation of software and screens, the automation of mental as well as manual work, the blurring of what it means to be a pilot—offers a roadmap for the much broader transformation that society is going through now. The glass cockpit, Don Harris has pointed out, can be thought of as a prototype of a world where “there is computer functionality everywhere.” 43 The experience of pilots also reveals the subtle but often strong connection between the way automated systems are designed and the way the minds and bodies of the people using the systems work. The mounting evidence of an erosion of skills, a dulling of perceptions, and a slowing of reactions should give us all pause. As we begin to live our lives inside glass cockpits, we seem fated to discover what pilots already know: a glass cockpit can also be a glass cage.