Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid__by_Nicholas_Carr

Is Google Making Us Stupid' By Nicholas Carr Carr through his personal experience states that Google and the internet reprogramming our memory and remapping neural circuitry but not in the best way. He can not do immerse himself in a book or a lengthy article as he used to do because of his concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages and his deep reading is a struggle. The recently published study of online research habits which shows the internet users tend to hopping through the sites and skim the information quickly without any intention to revisit the sources and read the whole book or article. That habit has to be the key in the decline of the deep reading and the flourishing of horizontally through titles reading instead of the “outdated” linear way. Reading is not encoded in human’s genes so we have to teach or mind to translate the symbolic characters. Our brain is very flexible in this aspect and shapes neural circuits easily if we practice enough the craft of reading. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading or even writing have a great influence on neurotic circuits’ remapping. For instance Friedrich Nietzsche without a typewriter could not have been managed to write down his thoughts so precisely. That instrument helped him to write down his thoughts fluently and it also had influence on his style of writing. He became tighter and more telegraphic. Nietzsche said “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” The way we think, read or write can easily change owing to our reprogrammable brain. Our inventions give us new, alter way of thinking and also took something away. For instance with the appearance of the clock we developed a scientific mind which based on the measurable time and we lost our natural sense of time and we started obeying the clock. Moreover people began to arrange most of their acts to the clock. The operation of the human brain became identified with the clockwork. And now in the age of software, figuratively we have computers in our skulls. The Internet can perform the function of any other information-processing devices. The next step is “knowledge work” and many programmers work on the perfect algorithm to achieve that and carry out every mental movements. These intentions are reinforced by Taylorism, the idea of the perfect system, “algorithm” which was born to seek maximum speed and maximum efficiency in the manual labour. “In the past the man has been first, but in the future the system must be first.” as Frederick Winslow Taylor declared. The Google marked out the perfect system of the knowledge work as a final goal. They want to create an artificial intelligence, a machine that might be connected directly to our brains. The human brain is an outdated computer according to the current tendencies. The idea of replacing our brain with an artificial intelligence sounds worrisome. Does it mean we give up thinking and our free will' The traditional and “outdated” concept of humanity will became endangered by the mankind itself and we will turn into undefined beings. I do not think we will be smarter or wiser from a perfect machine and I do not believe in the possibility of that type of artificial intelligence. In my opinion a kind of creativity is tightly connected to intelligence and a machine is unable to produce creativity. One thing is certain: if this artificial intelligence is possible, the current structure of the society will be restructured. The “highly educated and articulate personality” concept will disappear and became nonsense. Our knowledge will be equal or disproportionately dissonant and the both variants will lead to unpredictable consequences.