Argumentative Essay: Is Google Making USupid?

Is Google Making us Stupid?

The supercomputer Hal, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2007: A Space Odyssey, begs with Dave Bowman, an astronaut who is disconnecting memory circuits controlling Hal’s brain, to stop because Hal can feel the disconnection. Nicholas Carr, seems to know what his disconnection to staying focused on reading is, he has been spending more of his time on the web. Since he does not have to go to a library and spend time researching for information, he can stay at home and quickly search the internet for what he needs. The internet being our main source for information, there are advantages to having it at our fingertips, but there is also a price that comes with it. The web is slowly taking away the ability for the mind to store information,

Scholars from University College London have examined two of the most popular sites, and found people using the sites merely skimmed the articles and saved longer ones to read for later, which they may have not read. Even though we may be reading more than we did in the 70’s and 80’s with the help of cell phones and computers. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist, worries the Internet puts emphasizes on “efficiency” and “immediacy”, ruining our capacity for reading in depth, which emerged with the printing press. The technologies we use in our daily lives help influence the neural circuits in our brains, experiments show readers that use ideograms, like the Chinese, have a different circuitry then those who use an alphabet in their language. Fredrich Nietzche, whose eyesight was failing, bought a typewriter that saved him, allowing him to continue writing, after he learned touch-typing. A composer, who knew Nietzche, remarked on how his writing had changed to which Nietzche notes, “You are right, our writing equipment takes part in forming of our thoughts” (4). The brain is completely moldable, people did think that the connections between

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, are seeking to turn Google’s search engine into artificial intelligence, a machine that will connect to brains to search. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people – or smarter,” Page said in a speech years. “For us, working in a search is a way to work on artificial intelligence” (6). In a 2004 Newsweek interview Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to you brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your own brain, you’d be better off” (6). Google wants technology chief executive of Google Eric Schmidt says, “To solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence has never been solved. In Google’s mind, the brain is an outdated computer and ambiguity is just a simple bug that can be fixed. The idea, wanting our brains to be like high-speed computers, because companies gain more information when we browse so they learn more about us and can feed us ads. Companies don’t wants us taking the time to read an article because there’s no gain for them in that. Socrates despised the idea of people coming to rely on written word, fearing they would use it to replace knowledge, he wasn’t wrong about that, but he also didn’t see the