Blog Post Number One
In the excerpts from the books Hal and Me and Smarter Than You Think, both authors address the effects technology on people’s minds. However, both authors have very different views on these effects. Nicholas Carr, the author of Hal and Me, believed that the world wide web had negative effects on the mind and is causing people to become more lazy and read less sophisticated pieces of literature then ever before. Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think, believes the effects of the internet on the mind are still unknown. He argues that if people embrace this advanced technology and work along side it then peoples knowledge and skill can improve drastically.
In the passage from Hal and Me, the author wrote that due to the internet, he could feel his mind “slipping away” because he could no longer think without being distracted, which had not been a problem before the internet was created. Carr went as far as to say “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”(Hal and Me, page 6). The easy and fast access to knowledge the internet provides, caused Carr to no longer have the need to read full length passages, and caused him to turn to skimming through both long and mid sized passages in order to obtain information in the fastest manner. This “new brain” has greatly effected Carr. He believes the internet was making him less human and stated it was turning him “into something like a high-speed data processing machine, a human HAL” (Hal and Me, page 16).
Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think, had a different approach to how the internet has been shaping minds. Clive believes that though many find the artificial intelligence to be a threat to humans, that by collaborating with the machines, peoples skills and knowledge can improve drastically. He used the example of advanced chess to prove this point. In 2005, two amateur chess players competed in a freestyle chess tournament and won using their average computers and were able to beat multiple chess grand masters in the years after. These amateurs were able to succeed because they “were expert at collaborating with computers. They knew when to rely on human smarts and when to rely on the machine’s advice” (Smarter Than You Think, page 4). Clive believed that by collaborating with technology correctly, people could gain a wide variety of knowledge.
Through technology knowledge is absorbed by people everyday. Though it may come with negative consequences such as changing the way of thinking, if used correctly the internet could have a positive effect on peoples minds and the way knowledge is obtained.
