{"id":552,"date":"2008-06-10T15:09:04","date_gmt":"2008-06-10T22:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/06\/dumb-question\/"},"modified":"2008-06-13T18:42:23","modified_gmt":"2008-06-14T01:42:23","slug":"dumb-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/06\/10\/dumb-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Dumb Question"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic Monthly<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

What the Internet is doing to our brains<\/p>\n

BY\u00a0N<\/span>ICHOLAS\u00a0C<\/span>ARR<\/p>\n

Is Google Making Us Stupid?<\/h1>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

“D<\/span>ave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?\u201d So the supercomputer\u00a0HAL<\/span>\u00a0pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\u00a02001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial\u00a0brain. \u201cDave, my mind is going,\u201d\u00a0HAL<\/span>\u00a0says, forlornly. \u201cI can feel it. I can feel it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I\u2019ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn\u2019t going\u2014so far as I can tell\u2014but it\u2019s changing. I\u2019m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I\u2019m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would\u00a0get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I\u2019d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That\u2019s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I\u2019m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.<\/p>\n

I think I know what\u2019s going on. For more than a decade now, I\u2019ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m haunted by that scene in\u00a02001<\/em>. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer\u2019s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut\u2014\u201cI can feel it. I can feel it. I\u2019m afraid\u201d\u2014and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence.\u00a0HAL<\/span>\u2019s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they\u2019re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of\u00a02001<\/em>, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That\u2019s the essence of Kubrick\u2019s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

[ click to read full article at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic Monthly What the Internet is doing to our brains BY\u00a0NICHOLAS\u00a0CARR Is Google Making Us Stupid? \u00a0 “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?\u201d So the supercomputer\u00a0HAL\u00a0pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\u00a02001: A Space Odyssey. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}