Blog Post #1

The project of Nicholas Carr’s “Hal and Me” is to explain how the internet has altered the minds of those who use it frequently. He begins by comparing himself to a computer from the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” and how it feels like its mind is going. The internet has saved many people time and money when doing serious things like research or simple things like watching videos. Carr uses words like “feel”, “think”, “information”, “reader”, “mind”, “online”, “influence”, and more to establish this project. He interviewed people who thought the same things as him and realized that while the internet is a phenomenal resource, its influence has begun to alter how people feel and think. He says their minds are changing from focused to “scatterbrains”. It is evident in this argument that the internet, while incredibly beneficial for short-term and long-term goals, assignments, and life in general, is starting to make brains weaker when it comes to reading and other things that used to take little to no effort to complete. The project of Thompson’s “Rise of the Centaurs” is to express that computers are smarter than most people would think. They learn like humans do but without conscious error. He starts by explaining how a computer beat a man playing chess which was unbelievable to many, but not to people like Kasparov who believed that computers would learn to adapt and become better, but as a tool for humans. He says computers can understand all possible moves in a game of chess, but humans cannot because “there are more possible games than there are stars in our galaxy. If you total up every game possible? It outnumbers the atoms in the known universe.” Thompson uses words like “think”, “mind”, “thoughts”, “chess”, “human”, and “computer” to establish his project. He states that a machine’s mind thinks in an unhuman way so that its thoughts can go through billions of possibilities while playing chess and win. He then switched gears from humans versus computers to humans and computers, working together to solve problems rather than challenge one another. Thompson states his ideas of technology early on and they seem to be very similar to Carr’s in terms of “feeling the mind start to go”, but now he has made a 180 and believes that they are incredibly helpful and that together, humans and computers can work well together.