I read the entire article. Seriously, it's not hard.
The essay was 4218 words long, and at an average reading speed of 250 words per minute that's about 16 minutes.
While the author of the essay has some good points, I don't necessarily agree with all of them. Especially when he takes scenes from
2001 and tries to extrapolate them to be the essence of the entire movie. While the movie was fiction, it more or less is about the evolution of man from primordial cavemen to becoming an intelligent species capable of leaving their home world, along with themes of technology and advanced extra terrestrial intelligence.
Now, had the author actually done his reading, he would have known that later on in the
2001 "series", both Dave and HAL eventually become part of the higher intelligence represented by the monolith, or the final step in the evolution of man.
While on the surface it seems that the story of Google and the Internet and the fate of Dave and HAL are closely related, they aren't quite that perfect of a mesh, especially when he closes with humanity acting as an "algorithm" and the intelligence having the "emotions".
Anything we humans do - if you take a step back and examine life as a passive onlooker - is a series of discrete steps, an algorithm. We wake up to a buzzer, take a shower, prepare oneself for the day, eat breakfast, get in car/train/bike, go to work, stay there for eight hours, return home, eat dinner, find some sort of entertainment/activity, go to sleep. The next day it is repeated.
This can seem depressing, but not necessarily. Animals do the same thing, but there is one thing that differentiates us from them. We can choose to override any of these and make our lives different. We can choose to
call in sick take personal day, and go out and experience life. We choose what we want to do, what we want to read.
While it is true that the prevailing winds of society can influence all of our decisions, ultimately there's a little piece of plastic only a foot or two away from you can be pushed and switched off and this is all gone.
But the author also forgets some other critical aspects of humanity in response to all these new mediums of information. The
Flynn Effect actually has shown that over the past 100 years, the average IQ of a society has risen by an average of three points per decade. While this has not necessarily been a concrete and perfectly predictable occurrence, the fact that is is happening in spite of all the new and constant bombardments over the years of new forms of information is intriguing.
100 years ago, you rode around on horses and steam trains, and read information from newspapers and telegraphs. Electricity and the telephone had only penetrated the large markets, and were by a large part, "toys" of the rich. Then came radio, faster trains, airplanes, television, and finally the Internet. With these advances came a constant flow of new information and ideas, and we've had to readjust to process it all and find the "good data" among all the noise.
If anything, we've been training our brains to be more efficient.
And while the pace of society now makes reading to the same level of depth that was used to more difficult, it is not impossible. I know myself that I've noticed some of the same effects that the author described of it becoming harder to concentrate on reading, but only when it was boring material. If there is something I like, I can't put the book down. And I know this is true for a large portion of our population, regardless of the effects of the Internet. Just look how much J.K. Rowling got millions of kids to read multiple 700-1000 page books, each in two or three days.
// Alright, I've used up all my intelligent reasoning for today. Time to go play Bloons...