Monday, January 30, 2012

The Carr constructs his essay has an informative style at first and then takes on a pervasive tone as he explains how he feels about what is happening. I would have to say the purpose of his essay is to alert others of the pitfall of the new technology the WEB, the current destruction of mankind. As Carr pointed out this dooms day thinking has appeared throughout history with man still moving on to new and ever more freighting technologies, but still surviving. Just because there are negative side effects does not mean it’s bad. All things are good and bad. You just have to adjust, as my response to Carr’s essay shows.
                As I read the article by Nicholas Carr I think back to the first time I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, the thought of a computer doing what the PC of today do was still unthought-of. However it was intriguing to think that a HAL might be built someday. Then today we do not think "will it be possible" but instead "when will it be possible".
                I related to Carr's sense of losing one's brain power to the computers. I have seen it in my life. When I was in grade school about 1957 and they started to teach division, I had already been doing long division in my head for over a year. I loved math and even though I learned to use a slide ruler quite early I still liked to do math in my head for fun. The problem arose when I was going to WWU in 1975 and was taking a Physics class, the first test I found out the power of calculators. Most of the class finished in less than 15 minutes, but I took the whole hour. I received an A but it took me the whole period. The solution was to get a calculator. Over the years I have come to depend on a calculator for all my math problems, to the extent that it is now hard to do simple addition and subtraction without a calculator.
                As for the reading part of my mind I think I had noticed the decline about 3 years ago when I started using the Web for all of my research. I read less books and magazines, and even though I still read printed material I normally skip over and not really read like I used to. I still cannot read a lot on the computer so I print everything out and then read the print out. The tendency to jump from site to site is just like Carr described.
                I can appreciate Carr's skepticism about the Web but have seen the alterative and I feel the benefits out way the pitfalls. I would have loved the Web when I had all those research papers to write at ETBU in 1987 and had only a typewriter to write them on, no Web search only a library and books. However I can see from returning to college that an effort to do as much work without the aid of the computers to have a foundation to build is important. This does not mean not using the computers and the Web for school work but to be sure you understand how to do the work without them first.
                Our brains are very adaptive to change. The question is will it adapt for the better or for the worse, only time can tell. If the past is any indication I believe we are in for a wonderful change.
James Burke

1 comment:

  1. I definitely agree with you on the point of the inevitability of artificial intelligence, or as you put it, not “"will it be possible" but instead "when will it be possible".”
    It was interesting to read about your experiences with rapidly changing technology and how quickly we have to adapt to it. There is a possibility of our brains adapting “for the worse”, which I hadn’t really considered that much until I read this.
    I would like to be as optimistic as you are about the future of technology and how we will adapt, and I can imagine all of the wonderful advances that we might be able to make at some point. However, there is a side of the internet and technology that can be bad as well, as you mentioned at the beginning of your essay. For example, I find the idea of having our brains attached to information, or having an artificial brain, as Carr talks about in his article, to be a pretty scary idea. I hope that future technology doesn’t go down this road, but it seems probable that at some point it will.

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