This year I have been curiously mute about the impact on our
lives of the Internet and information technology more generally. Last year, on the other hand, I was obsessed
with the subject, publishing no fewer than seven postings about it. I tended to be mostly
negative, despite all the undisputed benefits the web places at our
fingertips.
For example, I joined MIT professor Sherry Turkle in being
disturbed by the "alone together" syndrome, epitomized by groups of
people staring at their smartphones and tablets rather than engaging face to
face with each other—a modern preference to communicate by texting or tweeting
rather than by physical presence [1]. With writer Nicholas Carr, I wondered
what the Internet is doing to the wiring of our brains—whether our constant
multitasking is making it harder for us to think linearly, as we do when we
concentrate on reading a book [2]. With New York Times columnist
David Brooks, I worried that online learning will diminish the passionate,
interactive experience that education should be [3]. And with Columbia professor Tim Wu, I
tried to parse the Internet forces that could constrain rather than hugely
multiply the availability of information [4].
Now comes a book that is almost
unequivocally positive: Clive Thompson's Smarter
than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. His
motif is stated plainly at the outset: "If this book accentuates the
positive, that's in part because we've been so flooded with apocalyptic warnings
of late." Indeed, the very
apocalypses of others are boons to him.
Thompson has morphed the original Apocalypse's nefarious four horsemen
into three very unapocalyptic Internet virtues:
• Memory Augmentation: We supplement our brain's memory using personal
electronic devices and the Internet's huge data banks, thus freeing us from the
chore of memorization so we can do more "human" things: intuit,
invent, conduct relationships.
• Focusing our thoughts: We
all are now writing far more than most of our forebears by incessantly blogging
(mea culpa!), emailing, texting,
IM'ing, tweeting, etc. In thus
writing down our ideas, we feel forced to hone them more precisely than we
would if merely thinking or mouthing them.
• Networking: Through our constant
online interaction, particularly in social networking, we have developed an
"ESP-like 'ambient awareness' … of what others are doing and
thinking," which expands our ability to understand people we care about
and to dispel "pluralistic ignorance" of people at a distance from
us. Networking also makes us more
collaborative.
Thompson's initial chapter, "The
Rise of the Centaurs," illustrates the first of these virtues—memory
augmentation—by using the example of chess. Technology makes it possible for the best computers to beat
the best chess masters, because computers can quickly explore every possible
chain of moves seven or more deep in the light of a huge memorized archive of
classical strategies, and choose the best next move, which can beat a mere
human's intuitive understanding of the state of play. But Thompson points out that even moderately good chess
players augmented by modest computers can beat either the best chess master or the most powerful computer playing alone. That is, a "centaur"
combining the human brain with a computer's memory and speed trumps all.
That's the main theme of the book:
humans will progress by delegating functions like memory and calculation to
machines, while reserving human, un-machinelike capabilities to themselves—a
complementary hybrid of organic and silicon chemistry. My son likes to think of this in sci-fi
terms: as a stage of evolution of Homo sapiens. Many foresee the next
step as direct electrical connections between the brain and the machine. Rudimentary links of this type have
already been fashioned to control artificial limbs—cyborgs rather than
centaurs, so to speak—but so far not to memory augmentation.
I myself can attest to the second
virtue—focusing our thoughts. In
the past twenty months I have written almost 100,000 words on this blog, a rate
of composition that astonishes even a retired academic like me. The process has forced me to turn
inchoate thoughts on a large variety of subjects into what I hope are
well-structured arguments and sentiments worthy of being read. Every paragraph—indeed, every word—I
write is examined and re-examined until it expresses the meaning and nuance I
intend. Thompson claims that,
despite the Internet Age's sometimes regrettable outpouring of badly composed
screeds, my experience is the more common; people in general are taking added
care in polishing their writings to a fine sheen. Further, he contends that increased literacy with the
written word has led to adroitness in other media when words alone won't do,
e.g., video commentaries on such sites as YouTube. Activity like this by ordinary people, when broadcasted, has
broken the stranglehold the powerful have traditionally had on public speech.
The impact of the third
virtue—networking—is even more dramatic, says Thompson. First, people are constantly
electronically telling each other of their doings, however trivial (to the
point where I wonder how they have any time for other daily pursuits). Thompson
asserts that this activity serves to create an invaluable "ambient
awareness" that binds society together and replaces the less spontaneous
and less efficient water-cooler and coffee-klatsch chit-chat of
yesteryear. Second, on-line
collaboration in projects such as Wikipedia has shown that placing our
knowledge on the web has a more personal quality than just storing cold
facts. The so-called wisdom of
crowds comes into play, in which many small, independent and interactive
contributions to a project can lead to faster and more accurate solutions of
problems.
A brave new world in the offing? We'll see. Even Thompson worries that outsourcing memory to machines
might impair the Eureka! moments that arise unbidden from the brain's obsessive and subconscious searching for
relationships among the myriad items stored in its own memory (see [5]). He is concerned about the falling away
of privacy as people sometimes rashly share thoughts that then permanently
become embedded in the web's memory.
He notes too that a collaborative network structured by sharing many
people's ideas can fall prey to a dominating personality who can transform the
group into lemmings—independent brainwork by each of its many members is
essential. On the other hand,
Thompson is less worried about the disruption multitasking imposes on our
ability to concentrate for long periods on a single task, feeling that each of
us will somehow figure out how to suppress multitask interruptions when we need
to, while taking advantage of their value at other times.
The pell-mell advance of the
Information Age is of course unstoppable.
None of us can predict where it will lead in ten years, much less a
century, no more than anyone in the early 19th century could have predicted
the impact of industrialization one hundred years later. Will Homo sapiens evolve by the 22nd century into a new
cyborg/centaur species—call it Homo sapiens artificialis—with implanted electronics fully integrated into
it? Will it be a self-perpetuating
species of the wealthier among us who can afford the implantations for
themselves and their offspring?
Will Homo sapiens itself
become a subordinated species?
Maybe we are headed for an apocalypse after all.