Googled?

Nicholas Carr asks in the July/August issue of the Atlantic whether Google is making us stupid. He points out that the web tends to scatter attention and diffuse concentration by bringing information from various sources at us all at once. As the web comes to dominate our access to news and entertainment, other media adjust to become more web-like. “Never,” he writes, “has a communications system played so many roles in our lives – or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts, as the Internet does today.”

Carr says that re-forming the way we think is a conscious goal of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two founders of Google. Brin said in 2004, “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.” Page has said that Google is aiming “to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Carr isn’t convinced that we’d be better off if our brains were “supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence.” He challenges the underlying view 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 The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.”