Jim on:Is Google Making us Stupid?

“Good morning, Dave”. The super computer HAL greets Dave Bowman in its pleasant voice. Is this so far fetched any more? With people like Sergey Brin and Larry Page at the helm of a company like Google, I think not so much. In Nicholas Carr’s essay,” Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he tells of how it is these two men dream to expand Google into an artificial intelligence.
Carr asks the question, by using himself as an example; is the easy access to information and the staccato way it is presented, making us stupid or is it changing the way we think? He sites a couple of examples of people that talk about how their reading habits have changed with more and more immersion into the internet. Many people have found, including Carr, that the time they spend on deep reading or reading that includes long involved text has taken a noticeable decline. The ability to stay focused or interested in the text is gone.
Carr goes on to question if this is such a bad thing or just a natural progression of an ever advancing technological society. Carr goes back in history to point out some of the biggest events in technological progress to make the point. The clock changed the way we look at time and time management, Carr brings up the printing press and how it made books available to a world that used to horde the precious text. Carr even brings up the effect that writing has on memory.
Any advancement has its pros and cons, its good and its bad and we have survived through it all. Will the internet change us from people who can read and understand complex text and ideas? Will we lose the ability to reason though these ideas? Will we become so dependent on artificial intelligence that we created that it will rule us? Sounds a bit like science fiction. As long as there are people, I believe there will be someone that will maintain the old arts. There will always be a person to repair an old DaVinci painting or an old steam locomotive engine.
Will there come a time when a supercomputer shuts us down, much like Dave did with HAL in Author C Clarks,”2001 A Space Odyssey”? I think the thing we need to remember about HAL’s malfunction was that it was caused by a conflict with his programming which was manmade. The programmers tried to get HAL to lie. So is Google making us stupid, I think we do a good enough job on are own. We need blame no one but ourselves.