Sean Tevis. Information architect. Decided to “retire” his current State Representative. He’s going to win. This is his story (XKCD homage style) so far. Running for State Representative in Kansas. Read the whole story here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the internet.
Some weeks ago, while in the US, I could not resist buying the latest Atlantic Monthly, seeing that Nicholas Carr had written a piece headlined “Is Google making us stupid?”
Incidentally, for some strange reason, the magazine insisted on spelling “stupid” as “stoopid” on the cover, ostensibly to play off the word “google”, but then went back to the normal spelling for the headline of the article itself. Weird. I couldn’t see the point.
But that’s not relevant. What is relevant is Carr’s article, which I read and liked even though I disagreed with a good deal of it. More on that later. That’s not what this post is about.
What this post is about is the responses to Carr’s article in the latest issue of The Edge. More particularly, it’s about an unusually rich crop of pithy statements included in those responses. Here are some samples:
W. Daniel Hillis: While we complain about the overload, we sign up for faster internet service, in-pocket email, unlimited talk-time and premium cable. In the mist of the flood, we are turning on all the taps.
Kevin Kelly: I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time.
Larry Sanger: Carr profoundly misunderstands the nature of the problem: to pretend that you can blame others (programmers, no less!) for your unwillingness to think long and hard is only a sign of how the problem itself resides within you. It is ultimately a problem of will, a failure to choose to think. If that is a problem of yours, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.
George Dyson: Nicholas Carr asks a question that all of us should be asking ourselves:
“What if the cost of machines that think is people who don’t?”
It’s a risk. “The ancestors of oysters and barnacles had heads. Snakes have lost their limbs and ostriches and penguins their power of flight. Man may just as easily lose his intelligence,” warned J. B. S. Haldane in 1928.
We will certainly lose some treasured ways of thinking but the next generation will replace them with something new. The present generation has no childhood immunity to web-based stupidity but future generations will.
I am more worried by people growing up unable to tie a bowline, sharpen a hunting knife, or rebuild a carburetor than I am by people who don’t read books. Perhaps books will end up back where they started, locked away in monasteries (or the depths of Google) and read by a select few.
We are here (on Edge) because people are still reading books. The iPod and the MP3 spelled the decline of the album and the rise of the playlist. But more people are listening to more music, and that is good.
Jaron Lanier:
The thing that is making us stupid is pretending that technological change is an autonomous process that will proceed in its chosen direction independently of us.
It is certainly true that particular technologies can make you stupid. Casinos, dive bars, celebrity tabloids, crack cocaine…
And certainly there are digital technologies that don’t bring out the best or brightest aspects of human nature. Anonymous comments are an example.
There are many others. It is worth your reading the original article by Carr and the rejoinders in the Edge.
No more Blue Screens of Death. Instead, we have these:
Contributions to the collection welcome. Just e-mail me at [email protected].
Over the years I’ve started to think harder about being “connected” by thinking harder about what it means not to be “connected”. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about the digital haves versus the digital have-nots, a discussion that soon goes down rabbitholes of economics-meets-education. By this I do not mean the traditional debate about net neutrality and cheap bits and expensive bits and who will pay, that’s another discussion that soon goes down the same rabbitholes, but with a twist of politics as well.
I mean something else altogether.
Today, I was sitting quietly in an exhibit that looked like a theatre in the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (known locally as MAMbo), waiting to see what happened next. I was the only person in this theatre-within-a-museum at the time. And what happened next was this. Two people, a man and a woman, started talking about their experiences of being blind. They talked about the difference between being blind from birth and becoming blind after having normal sight for a while. They talked about the role that memory played in that second instance, the memory of sight. How it became a frame of reference for many things later. How that memory decayed. How it played tricks.
And something about the way they spoke made me think of how kids today perceive being connected, particularly in the West, but increasingly in India and China as well.
You may gather from this that I think of being connected as an important thing. You’d be right. That’s why I wrote The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog the way I did.
You see, I think connectivity, particularly ubiquitous always-on mobile connectivity, can make a real difference in terms of health, education and welfare, and that it can make a difference today. The days of “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” and “there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” are long gone. Today the BRICS have bricks in their hands, the bricks are getting smaller and they’re always on.
Too often, when people try and make this point, the objections are common and predictable. “You don’t get it, these people need food first. They’re starving.”. And so the debate about connectivity gets waylaid. Ironically, this is often done by people who then pump up the volume about the importance of biofuels in solving the energy crisis…. the same biofuels that then drive grain prices up and make staple food harder to afford for many people…..but that’s another debate.
All I was thinking was this. Is connectivity becoming like sight and hearing and speech and mobility? And if so what does that mean for the endless debates we appear to be having about what the internet and the web are?
[An aside. If I take this analogy in reverse, I land up in strange places. Told you I was confused. Like a year ago I spotted David Beckham at the Diana concert. With my bare eyes. Was I somehow trammelling over his image rights as a result? Should my eyes be cut out in order to feed the God of DRM? That’s the way a lot of DRM logic appears to me.]
I first came across this some four or five years ago, when researching the web for Rube Goldberg machines. But all I saw were references to the original Honda “Cog” advertisement. More recently, since maybe 2005, there have been a number of versions on the web. This one seems the most “official”, I only came across it recently while continuing with investigations into the Rube Goldberg space.
Worth seeing if you haven’t already done so.
Why am I looking into Rube Goldberg machines? Simple. Because one day I want to build a large “marble run meets Rube Goldberg meets Heath Robinson meets perpetuum mobile“. Told you it was simple.
Why then do I bother to talk about this in a blog “about information”? Because I think there are many lessons we can learn by digging into the making of the video. Lessons like what? Like maybe there is a “the physics are different” lesson to be learnt about software development meeting virtual world. Like maybe now that a critical part of Hollywood, post-production, is encamped firmly in Bollywood, the economics change as well.
Just musing. Comments welcome.