Is Google making us stupid? That’s the question Nicholas Carr, author of such books as The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, is posing in his 2008 article titled with the same question in The Atlantic (Carr). His answer: Yes. Being a tech blogger and self-ascribed Google-user myself, I have trouble with Carr’s argument. He reasons that Google is representative of how the Internet is rewiring our brain and changing the way we think. Before Google (and essentially, the Internet itself), Carr says, people used to “deep read” which would allow us to “make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, and foster our own ideas.” With new media, people, such as Bruce Friedman, a pathologist at the University of Michigan Medical School, have “lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print.” Being lost in a sea of information our attention is scattered and our concentration diffused.
I believe Carr’s main argument stems from a fear of Google’s mission statement (and end-goal): Using artificial intelligence (A.I.) as a means to find information and solve problems. This sci-fi notion is definitely a possibility, assuming everyone continues using the Internet as they have. Is this a scary notion? To some, I can understand how it could be. But Carr’s argument fails to convince me. Throughout his article, he reaches out to various historical examples in which technology changed human behavior. These examples range from the clock helping us decide “when to eat, to work, to sleep, [and] to rise,” the stopwatch increasing factory productivity and even the printing press. These examples I feel only weaken Carr’s argument as they each assisted human beings perform more tasks, further demonstrating the malleability of the human mind.
Seeing as the Internet has become “our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” now is the time which humans have the greatest opportunity to consume the most information. While I do concede that we will not be able to think deeply about all of this information as there is so much of it, the opportunity to be exposed to such a wealth of information is one that should not be passed up.
While Carr does make an attempt to tug at my emotions with his parallel to the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey in which humans have become more robotic than machines themselves, I still fail to feel his fear. Carr himself called the Web a “godsend” as it significantly reduced the amount of time it took him to conduct research for his writing. This is exactly the point: Google makes information much more accessible than ever before. It helps find information and knowledge; it does not feed it to us. This is how in fact Google can make us smarter. We determine what information to consume and what information to ignore. The notion of Google eventually choosing what information we want as an artificial intelligence is many years away and is not something we should worry about at the moment, if it is in fact something to worry about.
How should I fear this future if Carr, who even calls himself a “worrywart,” uses the example of Socrates fearing writing as he thought it would replace “the knowledge [people] used to carry inside their heads” in Plato’s Phaedrus? Just as Socrates was shortsighted, as Carr notes, I feel Carr himself is shortsighted. The clock, stopwatch and printing press increased human efficiency and their capacity for knowledge, and so too will the Web, and perhaps A.I.
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