Google and the internet are change the way our brains work , no doubt about it . With the cyberspace at our fingertips , why bother to remember trivial fact when Wikipedia is just a click or two away ? In the latest issue of The Atlantic , Nicholas Carrmakes a convincing argumentabout the various ways our fixation with cyberspace is altering the means we recall , then tries to tell us that ’s a speculative thing . Here ’s why he ’s wrong .
Carr ’s argument is a insidious one so I suggest reading the whole feature article . But let me take a shot at a one - sentence distillate : The internet is giving us a form of ADHD when it comes to meter reading , and we should be frightened of that . *
I do n’t entirely disagree with the first part of that cerebration , but the second does n’t make a whole lot of sense . In Carr ’s own words , humankind have been formulate technologies that change the manner we thnk throughout our story :
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has call our “ intellectual technologies”-the puppet that extend our mental rather than our strong-arm capacity - we inevitably start to take on the quality of those technologies . The mechanical clock , which came into common enjoyment in the fourteenth century , provide a compelling example . In Technics and Civilization , the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “ disassociated time from human events and helped make the belief in an self-governing world of mathematically measurable sequences . ” The “ abstract framework of divided time ” became “ the point of reference for both activity and thought . ”
The clock ’s methodical ticking help bring into being the scientific brain and scientific man . But it also have something away . As the late MIT information processing system scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book , Computer Power and Human Reason : From Judgment to Calculation , the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread consumption of timekeeping instrument “ remains an indigent version of the older one , for it rest on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the fundament for , and indeed appoint , the sometime reality . ” In deciding when to exhaust , to work , to sleep , to rise , we stopped listening to our senses and started obey the clock .
Now I hate warning signal pin clover as much as the next guy cable , and it ’s on-key , we do live our lives by minutes and hours more than the cycles of the sun , moon , tide , or whatever . But is Carr really stress to say that the Parousia of the 9 - 5 job cancels out the advances of all of scientific discipline , math , and our understanding of the universe ? That ’s push it .
And so is this passage on how Google will one twenty-four hour period turn into theHAL-9000 :
Sergey Brin and Larry Page , the talented immature men who founded Google while pursuing doctorial degrees in computer science at Stanford , speak frequently of their desire to turn their hunt engine into an hokey intelligence , a HAL - alike machine that might be connected right away to our head . “ The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people - or smarter , ” Page enounce in a words a few geezerhood back . “ For us , working on search is a way to process on contrived intelligence . ” In a 2004 consultation with Newsweek , Brin said , “ Certainly if you had all the world ’s information now attach to your learning ability , or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain , you ’d be better off . ” Last year , Page recount a convention of scientists that Google is “ really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale . ”
… their easygoing premiss that we ’d all “ be beneficial off ” if our brains were supplemented , or even supervene upon , by an unreal tidings is unsettling . It suggests a belief that tidings is the yield of a mechanically skillful appendage , a serial of discrete steps that can be isolated , valuate , and optimized . In Google ’s world , the earth we enter when we go online , there ’s little billet for the fuzziness of reflexion . Ambiguity is not an curtain raising for insight but a microbe to be fixed . The human brain is just an out-of-date estimator that needs a faster processor and a freehanded hard cause .
Google ’s dominance of the digital world is admittedly a footling formidable , but HAL ? C’m on now . Actually Carr ’s clause lead and ends with references to the murderous and fictional computer , making it pretty clear-cut what he thinks about the role artificial intelligence will act as in our non - fiction hereafter .
In the end Carr ’s article is n’t entirely ham - handed — but his analysis is . He expect back on Socrates , who once wrote about how the excogitation of piece of writing would be the decease of us all . Later , other author thought the printing press would ruin the pursuit of cognition . Looking back , those sentiment seem shortsighted , and with upright intellect . They ’re actually grounds against Carr ’s case : If printing closet are any indication of how these things go , the net will help an intellectual revolution the ilk of which no one could augur in the former going away .
But Carr still argues that the internet is going to ruin the human judgment . Who knows , maybe he just could n’t resist the opportunity to compare himself to Socrates . Regardless , both Carr and the ancient Greek were incorrect on this one : their arguments are little more than over - intellectualized bellyaching that resemble former people ’s classic “ child these twenty-four hour period ” lecture . But alternatively of moan about modern young , the chorus is more like “ engineering these day . ”
- I realize the paradox here — if Carr ’s right , no one ’s rifle to go read the whole feature film . You probably wo n’t even read this whole post . You ’ll glance over the headline , perhaps a paragraph or two , then go flitting off to the next point . I ’ve got more faith in io9ers , though .
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