Post by kristincritchfield on Jul 25, 2011 14:02:41 GMT -5
So, the other day I searched on google for “the world’s most interesting sports.” I was curious, so why not? It turns out that Segway polo has become pretty popular among the older, upper class men of the world. Oh, and congratulations to the Solingen Blade Pirates from Germany on their big 2011 Segway Woz Challenge Cup win!
This spur of the moment google search made me think of the quote by Sergey Brin, mentioned in the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Sergey Brin says “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Who am I to say he’s wrong? With literally a computer for a brain, within seconds we could have any answer to any question we could think of. Homework would totally be a complete waste of time! Goodbye calculus! For a second there, Sergey Brin had me thinking, “What have we got to lose?”
However, like always, there’s a small amount of hesitation about your first opinion or impression of the subject at hand. Then, you get to really thinking about having a computer brain. It’s all fun and games until you start thinking for yourself, which is exactly what everyone would be missing if we had actual computers for brains. Sure, you can take the first “link,” or answer, as we would call it, and take it for your own, forever believing that two plus two is four or that Walmart has the best priced sock selection than any other store in town. But what if those answers that you take to be true aren’t? What if they’re entirely opinionated? Well, you see, we who have the computer brains wouldn’t even know the difference between an opinionated answer and the real thing because, let’s face it, we all just click the first link available anyway.
With the decline in actual opinions comes the decline in self-thought as well. Who’s going to contemplate whether or not abortion should be made illegal when our brains automatically tell us that it should be? Even now, with our average human brains, we can sift through a million and one websites and still not find the perfect answer to that question. So how could a computer brain condense every bit of information into one single answer and have it be entirely true? There are so many opinions out there. There can’t possibly be one solid, correct answer.
To end with an ending, Nicholas Carr’s final paragraph of his essay contemplated the woes of a machinelike society: “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” I can’t say that I don’t entirely disagree with the fellow. A total machinelike society is a little frightening to think about. Hey, we got self-thought and contemplation out of the way. Let’s all be robots. That’s just the way I see it.
This spur of the moment google search made me think of the quote by Sergey Brin, mentioned in the essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. Sergey Brin says “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Who am I to say he’s wrong? With literally a computer for a brain, within seconds we could have any answer to any question we could think of. Homework would totally be a complete waste of time! Goodbye calculus! For a second there, Sergey Brin had me thinking, “What have we got to lose?”
However, like always, there’s a small amount of hesitation about your first opinion or impression of the subject at hand. Then, you get to really thinking about having a computer brain. It’s all fun and games until you start thinking for yourself, which is exactly what everyone would be missing if we had actual computers for brains. Sure, you can take the first “link,” or answer, as we would call it, and take it for your own, forever believing that two plus two is four or that Walmart has the best priced sock selection than any other store in town. But what if those answers that you take to be true aren’t? What if they’re entirely opinionated? Well, you see, we who have the computer brains wouldn’t even know the difference between an opinionated answer and the real thing because, let’s face it, we all just click the first link available anyway.
With the decline in actual opinions comes the decline in self-thought as well. Who’s going to contemplate whether or not abortion should be made illegal when our brains automatically tell us that it should be? Even now, with our average human brains, we can sift through a million and one websites and still not find the perfect answer to that question. So how could a computer brain condense every bit of information into one single answer and have it be entirely true? There are so many opinions out there. There can’t possibly be one solid, correct answer.
To end with an ending, Nicholas Carr’s final paragraph of his essay contemplated the woes of a machinelike society: “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.” I can’t say that I don’t entirely disagree with the fellow. A total machinelike society is a little frightening to think about. Hey, we got self-thought and contemplation out of the way. Let’s all be robots. That’s just the way I see it.