Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic article)

[Richard Wallace]

This article is worth reading.

How we read it, and how our reading process has come to that -- well, those are the interesting topics.

[GaryVoshol]

Sorry, the article was too long, I skipped over half of it.

[DCA Fan]

Can someone read this for me and provide a quick summary?

/Kidding

[Travis Hoffman]

"Still, their [Sergey Brin and Larry Page] easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive."

And people laugh whenever I suggest that Google's ultimate goal is to control the world.....

I liked the article and the points it raised. I wonder how many will actually read all of it.....

"Dave, my mind is going.....I can feel it.....I can feel it..." - Classic.

[MrForbes]

"darn you, Internet!"

(oh...I hope no one gets that.....)

(or googles it......)

[Herodotus]

It's true that I don't read as much anymore, but it has a lot more to do with having other things to deal with then with not being able to focus on the book. So long as the book is good I can sit down and read through the whole thing without going to do anything else. Starship Troopers and Stranger In A Strange Land being prime examples.

However, the article brings up many good points. We have to be careful that we don't all become a culture of ADD that is constantly distracted by random things. We need to be able to keep our minds sharp and stay focused.

[MrForbes]

The author of the article seems not to understand that the movie 2001 is fiction.

He also might have mentioned something we can do to help: remember that our electronic devices have an "off" switch, and suggest we use it often.

[Molten]

Ok, my take. I read about a page of it. It makes interesting points but makes it sound like a negative. The fact that our minds is being reprogrammed to be more efficient is calming to me. I've never been a fan of reading, so I don't get the drama.

Kind of an irony, He states that nobody seems to read long articles in a long article. If he is aware of this problem, wouldn't it be best to make it short so that your words are read by the larger majority?

[smurfgirl]

Originally Posted by Molten

Kind of an irony, He states that nobody seems to read long articles in a long article. If he is aware of this problem, wouldn't it be best to make it short so that your words are read by the larger majority?

I agree, that's exactly what was going through my mind as I read it.

As for my opinion on the article... I don't fully agree with it. I haven't noticed in myself or in my peers any substantial difference in the way I perceive reading lengthy passages. The only reason why people may read less is that their lives are busier with other things?

[artdutra04]

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...

[Ashley Christine]

Well, I will admit that I skimmed through a bit of the article, but didn't have the desire to read it all.

As for the title of this thread "Is google making us stupid" I personally would say it isn't making us "stupid," yet causing us to use our brains in a different manner.

For starters, everything you could possibly want is right at your fingertips. I find it difficult to take the time and memorize things because I could easily go and google the answer. I find myself often google-ing things whether it is to make a coversion, or to verify that something I "thought" was right actually is right.

Who needs to know anything when you can just look it up? Kidding of course. I wish I was better able to memorize things because then it would save the time it takes to bring up google and search around!


I am going to go off onto another topic - but as I have mentioned memorization a few times, it is interesting because when I was younger I had to memorize phone numbers and things of that nature, now I have over 300 phone numbers in my cell phone - if I were to lose my phone, I would be able to call only my mom, dad, my sister and I would MAYBE be able to remember a few other numbers.

I think google and all the other handy tools we have are just making us all a little bit lazy. lol