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Why artificial intelligence is dangerous
Is google making us stupid by frederick winslow
Impact of the internet on education
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Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” poses the theory that the invention of the Internet is changing the nature of thinking and learning. In an age where answers to almost any question are only a few button clicks away, it seems we are living in an enlightened time. The internet has offered us so much, from scientific collaboration to crowd funding and to my personal favorite, more cute cat videos than I could watch in my lifetime. The internet has impacted humanity, raising the bar for research and leaps forward in technology. Carr seems to disagree, arguing that the internet and Google can be blamed for making us “stupid.” Google and the Internet are changing the
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After seeing the study in a new light, I realized that I had another question. Who is Nicholas Carr? I went back to the article and clicked on his name. I was brought to a page listing some of his other published works. “Should the Laborer Fear Machines?,” “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” “Googlethink,” and then of course, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I was sensing a theme in Carr’s work. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but it showed me that he fears technology. His article is now in my category “gloom and doom.” I think his article has many good arguments to show the dangers of the internet but lacks the opposing viewpoint. Carr lifted a quote from Wired’s Clive Thompson. A single line. “The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking… “ (Thompson). It makes you think that Thompson is ready to beam up onto the mothership, but when you read the entire passage, “…Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?” (Thompson). Thompson has his doubts, as he
Author Nicholas Carr’s article “Is Google making us Stupid,” discusses how the use of the computer affects our thought process. Carr starts out talking about his own experience as a writer and how he felt like “something had been tinkering with his brain, remapping his neural circuitry and reprogramming his memory”(313). Basically, he is acknowledging that since he started using the Internet his research techniques have changed. Carr believes that before he would immerse himself in books, lengthy articles and long stretches of prose allowing his mind to get caught up in the narrative or the
While his best arguments come from cultural criticism. Written text led to the decline of oral reading and television obliterated the radio. Every technology comes with it’s trade-offs, it just comes down to moderation. There is little doubt that the internet is changing our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is how the internet can change our brain for the better. Computer games have the ability to improve cognitive tasks and increase visual attention. He doesn’t always address the good effects that the internet has had on the world. One of the better strategies Carr uses is switching his point of view from third to first person. He reflects on his personal life and how his life has changed in response to what he has learned. Carr shows how even he has his faults but, being aware of a problem is the first step to finding
Carr captures his audience's attention by using an allusion from “Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, A Space Odyssey”. He stated the essay with “Dave, stop will you?” and the Supercomputer HAL plead. Any reader who has watch A Space Odyssey or interested in supercomputers to read his article. He highlights the fact that a computer could think for you. The states, “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain(Is google making us stupid? By Carr page 2)”. He made a point that the more people are found of the internet the more we lose ability to deep think.
In composing “Is Google Making Us More Stupid” Nicholas Carr wants his audience to be feared by the internet while at the same time he wants his work to seem more creditable. Nicholas Carr uses many different types of evidence to show us that we should be scared and feared as well as his credibility. Carr’s audience is people who think like him, who find themselves getting lost on the internet while reading something, someone who is educated and uses the internet to look up the answers to questions or to read an article or book.
He states how he used to spend hours reading, but his concentration started to drift after two or three pages. He backed up his theory with stories from others who say they’re experiencing the same thing. But they still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how the internet affects cognition. After a brief history lesson, Carr starts to incorporate Google into the article. He tells us about Google’s history and their mission. Carr states how Google, and the internet itself, have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind. Apparently these companies do not want us reading slowly or for leisure. Carr then ends the article by stating that we are turning into robots ourselves, and that we are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the
Nicholas Carr gives a sense of unbiased in his work when he writes, “I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the database of the internet. The web has been a godsend to me as a writer” (394). Though this statement it is clear that he sees both sides of the argument and by demonstrating this to the author he strategically is appealing to ethos and supporting his own argument. In hopes of building credibility, he begins to write, “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going ─ so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think” (394). Granted that he writes this in the beginning of his essay he is trying to credit himself as a victim which helps him support his argument against the constant usage of the internet. Nicholas Carr is aware that without building credibility within his essay the audience will dismiss his points as uneducated and meaningless.
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and Sherry Turkle’s “How Computers Change the Way We Think” both discuss the influence of technology to their own understanding and perspective. The first work by Nicholas Carr is about the impact technology has on his mind. He is skeptical about the effect it could cause in the long term of it. He gives credible facts and studies done to prove his point. While Sherry Turkle’s work gives a broad idea of the impact of technology has caused through the years. She talks about the advances in technology and how it is changing how people communicate, learn and think. In both works “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “How Computers Change the Way We Think” the authors present
Advancements in technology have strived to make life easier for so many people. In most cases, the advancements have achieved its goal, but in the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr questions if the improvements in society have unintentionally hindered our thought process overall. Carr begins the article by providing personal instances when his concentration seemed to diminish due to the internet. He explains how he now loses interest when reading lengthy portions, his mind just can’t seem to remain connected to his readings. He then proceeds to talk about how today’s life is surrounded by the internet, and explains the pros and cons of it. The negative side of it is that his mind now wonders off when seeking information from
Humans are becoming more technologically-efficient every day. New inventions and innovations are constantly being made. The Internet is becoming more “reliable” every day. However, how much do we really get from the constant advancement of Internet use and smarter technology? Should we look at their contributions to the world as a benefactor or a curse? The common effect of “artificial intelligence” in the technology we use every day is examined by two brilliant authors, Nicholas Carr and Jamias Cascio. In Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, he explains the effects of the Internet and technology in our society and claims that the overuse of technology is dangerous and can affect how our mind operates. Jamias Cascio, on the other hand, uses his article “Get Smarter” to show the positive effects of technology in our constantly adaptive society claims that technology may just be making our society smarter and more efficient. While Carr and Cascio both use the claim of cause in their articles to provide valid points on how technology affects our society, Carr’s article proves to be more effective because it focuses on skeptical-based evidence and uses a variety of appeals and proofs.
Atlantic journalist Nicholas Carr confesses that he feels something has been “tinkering with his brain.” The internet, he fears, may be messing with our minds. We have lost the ability to focus on a simple task, and memory retention is steadily declining. He is worried about the effect the internet has on the human brain, and where it may take us in the future. In response to this article, Jamais Cascio, also a journalist for the Atlantic, provides his stance on the issue. He argues that this different way of thinking is an adaptation derived from our environment. Ultimately, he thinks that this staccato way of thinking is simply a natural evolution, one that will help to advance the human race.
These two articles are similar in the sense that they agree that the internet and computational objects are reshaping our brain’s structure by changing our neural circuit. By using examples from their personal experiences to identify a trend in technology use, the authors illustrate that the more we bury ourselves in technology the more we are unable to understand material which leads to loss of concentration and the ability to think for ourselves. As an author, Carr finds the internet a beneficial tool, but it’s having a bad effect on his concentration span. Carr points this out by stating “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy, now I get fidgety, lose the thread and begin looking for something else to do” (39). He is no
Nicholas Carr, an author who often writes about technology and culture issues, wrote the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”(313). Carr begins his essay with the iconic script from Dave and HAL at the end of 2001:A Space Odyssey. He nervously explains, “ Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain… I'm not thinking they way I used to think…” (313). Carr has found trouble focusing on reading, often becoming fidgety, he links this to his frequent Web use (314). Those around him are having similar experiences, Scott Karp, a blogger, writes, “ What if I do all my reading on the Web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. Im just seeking convenience, but because the way I think has
Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” asks the audience a rhetoric question that inquiries about the development of artificial intelligence. Technology has grown with every generation that has existed, but it was not until the Internet that its popularity intensified dramatically. With millennial births came this invention, which has seen drastic improvements since its own birth in 1994. Though innovations like Google, smartphones and personal computers have made answering life’s questions easier, it has also decreased the brain’s ability to do particular functions it once was trained for, and has changed the way we process information now (Carr, 731.)
Nicholas Carr argues in his controversial article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that technology, specifically; the Internet and the devices we use to access the Internet (smartphones, computers, and tablets) are having detrimental effects on mental cognition. I do not think these effects are limited to just the way we are reading. It is beyond...
Expert Warns Against Internet Overuse; Says Google Generation Susceptible to Brain Death." International Business Times - US ed. 26 Dec. 2012. Academic OneFile. Web.