Jon on "Is Google Making Us Stupid"

“As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” A statement that is made loud and clear in Nicholas Carr’s article for The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”. Carr begins by expressing his personal and others experience with the web, claiming that something has “been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory”. This something he is talking about is the internet. He begins showing the reader that we simply can no longer get deep into reading, that we do nothing but skim and skip through a book or article. That most people simply don’t even read out of books anymore, “ What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, … but because the way I THINK has changed” acknowledged Scott Karp, a blogger for online media. Carr then brings us factual evidence rather than opinion with the “Study of Online Research Habits” conducted by the University College London. In this study scholars examined the way people would research on two popular sites for five years. One was operated by the British Library and the other a U.K educational consortium. In their study they found people showed “a form of skimming activity” going from source to source and almost never returning to a site they had been to. He then goes on to reinforce his idea with developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, “We are not only what we read”, “We are how we read”. By the immediate touch of a button we can find just about find anything we are searching for, and this takes away from the deep reading that we did during the age of the printing press. When we are on the web we become “mere decoders of information”.

The human mind was not born with the ability to read it is not instinctive, “We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand and the media or other technologies we use in learning… play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains”. Carr goes on to talk about the differences in a reader of chineese ideograms and a reader of the alphabet and how their mental circuitry is wired in another way. The mind adapts to what it has to, it “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions” adds James Olds, a professor of neuroscience.

So this means that the brain alters itself to fit the needs of the current situation, “In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” States MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizebaum. The clock had given the brain a new way to structure itself based on a schedule rather than an emotion or feeling. This idea of efficiency and speed came to be with Taylorism, a system first brought to us by Frederick Winslow Taylor. He went to a Midvale steel plant in Philadelphia testing the times and every movement done by the workers and the machine. Out of his data Taylor created a set of very detailed instructions on how to do each job. The productivity of the factory boomed and soon every industry and country would adopt Taylorism.

Google is “ a company that’s founded around the science of measurement” and wants to “ Systematize everything” said by chief executive of Google Eric Schmidt. Carr then insists that “What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind”. A statement that becomes very clear threw out the rest of the article. So what is Googles main goal? Carr believes that Google has the “desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence” and Google founder Sergey Brin reinforces his idea with a quote from his interview with Newsweek “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain you’d be better off.” A statement that would make philosopher Socrates roll in his grave, who said “receive a quanity of information without proper instruction, would be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” And that they would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom”. Which really spoke to me as a human being, I don’t want to be able to just upload data into my mind, I want to earn it, research it, and absorb it on my own. I want some of the “real wisdom” that Socrates was talking about. I guess there is nothing more we can do but follow the system and let our brains rewire themselves over and over again adjusting to new ways that come with the years. Overall I agree with Carr in his ideas, taking in his points while most likely doing exactly what we warned me of, skimming the paper or getting up to do something else in the middle of a sentence. I find Kubrick’s “dark prophecy” just to be as unsettling as Carr does, so I will end this how I started it quoting Carr, “ as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”