Better Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For The Better By Clive Thompson

The author, Clive Thompson, is a journalist and blogger for the New York Times Magazine and Wired. When looking at his article, “Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better”, we see from the start that Thompson believes that in the progressively changing world we live in today, that new technology is the best route to take in advancing our knowledge and advancing in society. Certain technology is going to advance us in a positive direction in advancing our knowledge and memory. Thompson uses chess as his main example when explaining his reasoning behind his case, but it’s not just chess that technology is going to help, it’s going to help in all aspects of life.
At the beginning of Thompson’s article, he uses an emotion appeal when he says, “So the idea of a machine outplaying a human has always provoked both

excitement and dread”. He uses this at the beginning to set the tone for the rest of his article. This emotional appeal is affective because it makes the audience think right away how they feel about machines and technology. He uses this appeal, so he can get his audience feeling a certain way, and then he goes into detail about his claim that people shouldn’t be fearful that technology could do something like outplaying a human in something. He builds off of the appeal to show that people should be excited about new technology and innovation because it leads to people becoming more creative and having a stronger memory, which in turn leads to people becoming smarter.
I agree with Thompson’s claim and for many good reasons.

The first is, that I agree with Thompson’s claim that we do live in a society where things are constantly changing, and we need to keep up with this by advancing our understand in technology because it can help us for the better. The second reason I agree with Thompson’s claim is that advancing our understanding and applying this new technology in our lives is making us more creative and daring. I believe that studying and learning about this new technology is making us more creative because we can do and learn things that we never would have been able to without it. Lastly, I agree with Thompson’s claim that technology is making us receive and learn information a thousand times faster than we could before. For example, before the internet and computers we would have to go to hard copy books and try and find the information we needed, but now that is a thing of the past. We can find the information we need and apply it a lot faster, which saves time, effort, and leads the person to be able to get a lot more done in a time period than before this

technology.