Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic (July/August 2008) - "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on.
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. Class explores the good and evil of Google / UCLA Today. It's one thing to hear Professor Todd Presner's shrewd insights into how Google is changing the world. It's another to sit in on his undergrad class, "The Googlization of Everything," and hear the surprising attitudes of his students, most of whom were born in 1990. "It doesn't matter if Google is making us stupid," said one student, before giving a rationale for her alarming comment. "A hunter might say that a grocery store makes us stupid, because we no longer know how to hunt, but if the grocery store means we don't need to hunt, then it doesn't really matter. It's the same with Google.
Presner, an associate professor of Germanic Languages who has won accolades and awards for digital innovation, understands why his students think such things. "These are students who have always known the Internet. With a room full of students who've hardly known life without search engines, cell phones and blogs, his class zeroes in on Google, possibly the biggest influence of all.
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the R. Maryanne Wolf. Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford, KBE (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate the British sociologist Victor Branford.
Life[edit] Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912.[2] He studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research, but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree. In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio electrician.[1][3] He was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal.
He later worked for The New Yorker where he wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues. Mumford's house in Amenia. KurzweilAI.net. Joseph Weizenbaum. Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German and American computer scientist and a professor emeritus at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. Life and career[edit] Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in January 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 at Wayne University, in Detroit, Michigan. In 1942, he interrupted his studies to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a meteorologist, having been turned down for cryptology work because of his "enemy alien" status. After the war, in 1946, he returned to Wayne, obtaining his B.S. in Mathematics in 1948, and his M.S. in 1950.[1][2] Around 1952, as a research assistant at Wayne, Weizenbaum worked on analog computers and helped create a digital computer.
Weizenbaum was the creator of the SLIP programming language. In 1996, Weizenbaum moved to Berlin and lived in the vicinity of his childhood neighborhood.[5][2] Works[edit] See also[edit] Computer Power and Human Reason - Wikipedia, the free encycloped. Joseph Weizenbaum's influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976; ISBN 0-7167-0463-3) displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while artificial intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. Comments printed on the back cover illustrate how the Weizenbaum's commentary and insights were received by the intelligentsia of the time: "Dare I say it?
— Keith Oakley, Psychology Today "A thoughtful blend of insight, experience, anecdote, and passion that will stand for a long time as the definitive integration of technological and human thought. " — American Mathematical Monthly — Theodore Roszak, The Nation. Extract from "Computer Power and Human Reason" That last posting jogged my memory and I dug out the following text that has been lying around forgotten in my filesystem for almost ten years.
The following extract is taken from a chapter by Joesph Weizenbaum that originally appeared in his book "Computer Power and Human Reason". I came across it in a book that I am currently reading: Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices edited by Charles Dunlop and Rob Kling, published by Academic Press, Inc. Weizenbaum's chapter is entitled "Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason" in the section on Ethical Perspectives and Professional Responsibilities. I would recommend the book to every computer scientist. In particular, the following extract struck a few chords with me. It happens that programming is a relatively easy craft to learn. Unfortunately, many universities have "computer science" programs at the undergraduate level that permit and even encourage students to take this course. Marshall McLuhan. Research shows that Internet is rewiring our brains / UCLA Today.
The generation gap has been upgraded. In a world brimming with ever-advancing technology, the generations are now separated by a "brain gap" between young "digital natives" and older "digital immigrants," according to Dr. Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory and Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and UCLA's Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging. "We know that technology is changing our lives. It's also changing our brains," Small said during a recent Open Mind lecture for the Friends of the Semel Institute, a group that supports the institute's work in researching and developing treatment for illnesses of the mind and brain.
Small's talk centered around his recently published book, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. " The human brain is malleable, always changing in response to the environment, Small said. Photo.