Sorry to disagree with your entire article so vehemently, but using google to look up a phone number, website or convert pounds to kilos is less of an evolutionary mind number than when the abacus and then the calculater first came out to help people with their math.
No need to remember the times table anymore. Take out the calculater and 12 x 12 instantly becomes 144, each and every time result guaranteed until the batteries die.
Did the world witness a huge loss in brain power over the loss of the need to memorise the times table??
No. Instead, it actually led to an increase in brain power by allowing us mortals to use our brains for what really is important and for what no calculator, computer or google will ever replace..........the gift of logic coupled with ingenuity........which is why we have companies like Google in the first place, and why we have bio tech companies making huge advances in medical science that is beathtaking to say the least.
So if tapping in a web addresss in the google seach bar frees up some space in our brains to work on somthing a little more complicated than remembering a URL.......so be it!!!!
Ali
· 2 years ago
While it's true that our brains can do without the extra CPU usage of remembering a times table, but then in the future people will start demanding exams without questions but just multiple choice answers. Saying it's too much of a strain on my kid...
Next humans will want to just be able to think of something and see it pop up. Technology does make a few things easier, but if we get dependent on it then I feel the "majority" become spoiled from the convenience it provides.
I've found that my handwriting has gotten worse, ever since I started writing emails instead of letters. Hey, maybe we should just do away with writing altogether and destroy all pens and pencils! Everyone should have a laptop.
Art schools don't need easels or paintbrushes, just install Photoshop or GIMP!
Stan_Schroeder
· 2 years ago
@James: you haven't disagreed with the article. You actually agree with me on the main point: that Google (and Internet) is changing the way we think. The only difference is that I see it as a possible problem, while you see it as an advantage. At the end of the article, I've actually included the possibilities you mention.
JAMES BARCLAY
· 2 years ago
Yes, Stan,
To be fair, you have indeed mentioned the possibilities that it may not be that bad a thing....but we do disagree on the eventual outcome....which is fine!!
Its what makes the world go round and provides for thought provoking debate.
Thank you Sir
Bakstuh
· 2 years ago
I have to agree with Mr. Barclay on this one as well. This article is almost entirely biased towards 1 particular type of human, a dumbass. When I submit search queries through Google, even if they are these trivial pieces of information, I still retain them if I had read them in a book. Quite honestly, searching via means of a computer/internet can be a bit more stimulating than searching through say, a book, and thus retained a bit easier. Anyone else agree?
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
GMail users are young, rich, and good in bed, remember? ;)
Ali
· 2 years ago
I use Gmail a lot, needless to say that statement has truth in it.
JAMES BARCLAY
· 2 years ago
Thankyou Pete.
Srinivas
· 2 years ago
Oh yes, that's why I have three gmail accounts! My wife's very happy every time I get a new gmail account, LOL.
Nitin
· 2 years ago
Yes but must to think better we have to get out from bed
fo.unta.in
· 2 years ago
Good Points. The other point you missed is about Google gaining monopoly on information. For the current generation and future generations, if Google pulls out a page that says capital of India is Mumbai, it might be difficult to convince them that it is wrong.
the count
· 2 years ago
Oh man, try doing a search on google, and then do exactly the same search on altavista. It's almost as if they have some secret agreement to not return the same pages, the result set is so different between the two.
Talk about monopoly on control of information. It's pretty scary. I no longer trust google to not be evil and am trying hard to break my habit of relying on it so much.
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
The really dumb thing is that we still grade kids on how much they can remember. The real value is in your ability to process new information: creativity, critical thinking etc.
Marco Mugnatto
· 2 years ago
Totally agree. We are not robots. Evolution is this: things that were hard before become easy now, and it allows us to open new frontiers, and those new doors are as hard as the old ones, they are only different. Note: english in not my native language.
Martin
· 2 years ago
Actually, google makes you smarter. For years human beings had to fill their brains with stuff like capitals, presidents, unit conversion rates. Thanks to google, we now may fill our brains on things that matter.
the count
· 2 years ago
Like who the contestants are on tonight's edition of American Idol!
Sorry. I agree that it gives us the POTENTIAL for doing better things with our brains, but looking at what the vast majority of people are actually doing, that potential is not be realized in the vast majority of cases.
Marco Mugnatto
· 2 years ago
This hasn't changed in centuries
farmhand
· 2 years ago
I use google as a spellchecker for words. Mozilla loads quicker than Microsoft word, i type in the word and google brings back the correct spelling.
Si
· 2 years ago
Umm, there *are* other Internet search engines even if Google is currently the better one. But you're not really talking about Google, even though you name it so many times; you're talking about easy access to a huge body of information. So we don't have to remember stuff, just find and analyse it. Along with arithmetic (not math), farming, sewing and good handwriting it's just another diminished skill supplanted by technology.
josh
· 2 years ago
I'd have to disagree with you. We have become better at different things. I think that having a shallow knowledge of a broader range of subjects coupled with the ability to expand your knowledge when required is better than having focusing on a few areas.
People do not make good encyclopaedias. Why go to a lot of information to remember very specific facts when a computer is far better at it? Did you ever really know that a kilogram was 0.45359237 pounds, or did you only remember a far more approximate value? As long as you know how to find the information you need then you will be fine.
Allen Stern
· 2 years ago
Alrighty, here are my thoughts (for what they are worth :)
When companies sent the "1st level" work overseas, the idea was the us here in the "developed countries" could move on to bigger and better things.
Is it the same with Google? Does using Google search to find the ratio of F to C in temperature allow us to move on?
Let me try another analogy. Back in the old days, everyone wrote HTML by hand. Then these fancy (crappy) programs came along to write HTML for you. As I taught more and more people how to write HTML, I explained that you must learn how to do it first on your own by hand and then if you decide to use a program, fine. (I don't use any program even today.)
The same should go for most any technology or thing. Learn how it works first, spend time understanding it. Then you want to use a shortcut, fine.
The Internet has made people stupider because it allows people to forget to use their brain.
There is that old saying about teaching a kid how to milk a cow, but I forgot it! Maybe I should use Google to find it.
Marco Mugnatto
· 2 years ago
"Back in the old days, everyone wrote HTML by hand. Then these fancy (crappy) programs came along to write HTML for you."
This allowed people to concentrate on coding, and made the web more interactive (this is what's called the Web 2.0). This is the way any evolution goes.
Srinivas
· 2 years ago
Exactly, exactly! When I first started writing, I wrote with a chalk, and then a pencil, even when fancy pens were a plenty. My kids will still learn tables, still learn the conversions and capital cities..But late in the night when they are asleep and when I have to confirm what the capital city of Yemen is, I'll go Google it up!
Pete Cashmore
· 2 years ago
I think maybe you could draw a comparison here to Sat Nav: we keep hearing how GPS units are taking drivers in the path of trains, up dangerous roads, into the sea and so on. We're at a point where you can outsource a lot of your basic thinking/memory to machines, but there are times when the tech can't help and you need to rely on your own brain.
amith
· 2 years ago
Science says, life evolves the way it's being used. Human hands and feet took their shape from the ones of apes because of the heavy use, or maybe the kind of use they had. There are theories that say some plants grew thorns to avoid the nuisance of the animals, that ate up their leaves. In turn, the animals evolded with longer tongues that could reach the leaves avoiding the thorns. The Red Queen Phenomenon. You run as fast as you can, to stay where you are.
Now considering the way we live today, the heavy usage of a few fingers to type or use the mouse, a part of the brain to use the logics, and losing the ability to memorize things (forget Presidents, capital cities.. most of us can't even remember a friend's phone number since the cell phones became so common).. just think of the shape of the humans of the future. I always see humans that resemble the aliens in most sci-fi movies. Huge head, 2 or 3 fingers, huge eyes, and and over-all dumb look!!!!
ANP
· 2 years ago
Have thought about this for years -- what a great discussion!
Pete, I'm with you on this one. And also Amith. And Martin. And ... wait, I've forgotten who else I agree with, let me Google it ...
Mark
· 2 years ago
I'd say my overall intelligence has definitely grown thanks to google. This is because I use it to plug gaps in my knowledge that I'd probably have left unlpugged if I'd had to go to the effort of going to a library, or indeed 'asking Jeeves'... for things like conversions I would have previously checked my day planner!
Mark
· 2 years ago
Oh, great blog btw!
Josh
· 2 years ago
If the topic of this article interests you I HIGHLY recommend you read "The Extended Mind" by Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
If you enjoy that paper I would recommend you check out these two books:
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence by Andy Clark
and
Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins ____
"Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head!"
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira
· 2 years ago
Of course I use the Intarwebs to look up phone numbers. The phone book gets out of date very quickly, and they are getting smaller and smaller to the point you can't even read the text. And directory assistance costs MONEY.
And if anyone wants to know why "search this site" is better than most of the in-site searches? Try finding a product on Epinions.com using their in-house designed search, then try Google. Half the time, their search says a product isn't even ON the site. It's a time-waster, and more likely to make me leave the site. Google isn't making me dumber; it's helping me search smarter.
David Berkowitz
· 2 years ago
"How many times did you use Google to find an article within a specific website instead of using this website’s search?"
Often Google's search is better, even when Google powers sites' search. Ahh, the irony.
Alfonz
· 2 years ago
Being smart is not about remembering things. You remember the things you want to remember. Being smart is about being able to reason, and draw valid conclusions from the information you have. Google can't do that for you. It can provide you with a lot of information, though, so if your brain can process it, you can achieve a lot more.
I have no problem with external memory storage for my brain.
Andrea
· 2 years ago
Sir. Don't displace your issues on the rest of society. If you really wanted to remember how to convert pounds to kilograms, you would. Perhaps we are freeing up our brains to remember less frivolous information. Because when I'm doing my physics homework, the most important part is not the conversion. And before I even had google, I had a calculator. There's a reason they've started to allow the use of them in schools - it's not the arithmetic that matters when you're in linear algebra.
Lorimer
· 2 years ago
That's where Google is going -- towards a development of a semantic web, a web that knows what you forgot or what's in the tip of your tongue.
C.S.
· 2 years ago
The fact that we don't have to cram web addresses into our brains allows us to focus on the actual information we do absorb from looking keywords up on Google and being taken to specific sites. I suppose you could say phone/address books on cell phones and/or email are making us dumber because we no longer have to remember anyone's number or address, we just look that info up by their name. But that's not an argument most of would make, right? Memorization as a sign of intelligence/smarts/knowledge only holds true in about a handful of disciplines.
These aspects of technology make finding the information we need easier, so we spend less time searching and more time learning.
Richard
· 2 years ago
I was told, many years ago, by an esteemed professor that intelligence is not based on how much random data can be recalled, but by knowing where to find the information, and then understanding it.
miguel
· 2 years ago
hahahaha, the guy who wrote this is lazy... siriously
miguel
· 2 years ago
ok, so from were I'm I suppose to get the information aliens?! I think so abstractly and have a so great critical thinking abilities you not understand the context of the first sentence. If your a old teacher you don't have a say in this. if i wer in a isolated from where would i get information? learn new stuff? i just believe old people do this.
joao
· 2 years ago
so, did you manage to think of the topic for this article all by yourself or did you google it? because it's been around for quite a while... :)
David Bradley
· 2 years ago
Didn't the idea of learning by rote get thrown out years ago? It's all about application these days? Who memorizes great tracts of data when it is so accessible with a few clicks? Moreover, working out precisely which keyword string to use to get to any particular block of data is a much better measure of intelligence than simply knowing a bunch of facts in the first place.
Can you name all fifty states and place them on a map? No? But you can figure out what keywords to use to find a labeled map of the US using a search engine, right?
db
the count
· 2 years ago
The thing about rote memorization of large quantities of data isn't that you remember all of it in excruciating detail years later, but to make you aware of key concepts and ideas that are out there in the first place. A search engine is useless if you don't know WHAT to search for. The rote memorization you get even into college is there to make sure you know what to know. Google is just there to help you with the minutiae of the subject matter. You still gotta know what to search on in the first place.
For example, I was looking up the site of the nearest volcanic activity to my home (which is very far away from any at all, being on the eastern side of the US) and google brought up various places out in the western part of the country - Yellowstone being the closest. But then I had the thought that the Caribbean seems like a likely candidate for volcanic activity as well, and it might just be closer than Yellowstone. Low, there in the West Indies was a site 200 miles closer than Yellowstone. If I didn't already have some idea about the geography of the western hemisphere, I would have been content with google's first set of results showing Yellowstone as the closest. Google tries to be smart - it probably thought since I had a US ip address I was interested in results in the US, but I wanted a broader search result than that.
I actually get that quite a lot - google's attempts to be "smart" by returning results based on the geography of my IP address frequently causes me no end of frustration. I'd just as soon it wasn't so "smart" and just returned exactly what I asked for, not what it thinks I really meant to ask for.
That's another hidden danger in google that doesn't get talked about nearly often enough.
sarcnap
· 2 years ago
Count has a point here. inventions or insights are a result of combining known things into something new. The catalyst could be a new piece of information (which could be found through google :) If 1 is to lazy to fill the brain with information 1 is only consuming and not creating
Michael Müller
· 2 years ago
This is so true.
Heman
· 2 years ago
Holy flawed logic Batman!!!
Claiming that the ability of a person to think or memorize basic mathematics or facts is being destroyed because we, as a society, have a tendency to use Google to find out facts we don't remember, and warranting this with the fact that we don't remember urls, but rather Google strings, is logically tenuous at best.
Further, the fact that we remember google strings over urls is not exactly a problem. Using Google over a websites own search is not only not a problem, but is either not a bad idea, as Google is usually more effective, or is no different, as many websites simply use a form of Google themselves when you search.
Saying that inability to look something up on google is a problem is again without any merit. How many times have you not known a spelling or definition, and been a tad irked because you lack a dictionary? Saying that a lack of some knowledge being aggravating is a problem caused by google is a totally nonviable claim, as it has no problem nor logical link.
Finally, using the best tool available IS NOT A PROBLEM. If it's faster to Google a conversion than to bust out some paper, and do the calculation, then doing it with Google is not an example of you getting dumber. Rather it is, in the grand tradition of reality, simply using the full available toolset that life provides.
kthnxbai.
The Cannabis Connoisseur
· 2 years ago
What's an "internet"? I think I'll google it...
Craig Ritchie
· 2 years ago
I can only assume that this post was created to fire up the Digg community and drive traffic with controversy -- a tactic sometimes recommended for bloggers, but in this case, an almost sleazy choice. Of course hardcore Googlers are smarter.
Mark
· 2 years ago
I don't think Google necessarily makes us dumber - it actually makes us smarter, and it saves the amount of time I would have had to spend to look up some obscure MySQL command or whatever.
Dead tree companies like O'Reilly are the ones who have a lot to fear.
sean percival
· 2 years ago
"did you mean..."
Had made my already atrocious spelling even worse :(
Heman
· 2 years ago
So, if you're not doing this to generate traffic, you're simply an idiot, right? Because either you realize this is bollocks and did it for shock, or you think you have a legitimate point, and are simply stunningly blind to basic logic.
xian
· 8 months ago
Or, perhaps, the blogger decided to write this because people still find joy in intellectual discourse. As well as the cathartic power of writing and the sheer pleasure of articulateness.
John Hancock
· 2 years ago
Thank you for an exciting discussion of a truly profound topic. I'll be 60 years old in August. My design and communications career began with rote learning, manual typwriters, slide rules and T-squares, then progressed through 80-column punch cards, the IBM "Memory" typewriter, hand-held calculators and personal computers, to spreadsheets, digital photography, and internet search engines.
Each new tool allowed, even encouraged, me to develop ideas that would simply never have occurred to me before the tool became available. In this sense, I would say that internet search engines have made me a "smarter" researcher in the same way that MacDraw made me a "smarter" designer, and Excel made me a "smarter" manager.
And having spent countless hours in real libraries searching through real newspapers, real magazines and real books, I can state categorically that the web and its search engines make you smarter faster. Google lets me find information from more different starting points. It sends me off on more interesting side journeys, where the real gems often lie. It also throws up more chaff and misdirection, but hey, that's research.
The unreliability of much of the information on the web has made serious researchers "smarter" about finding additional sources. An abundance of unreliable information also forces you to think harder about what you discover. Can you trust this information? Does it make sense? Does it square with everything else you've found? Well, that depends on "A" and "B" and "C", doesn't it?
This is the essence of intelligence, and I belive Google et al have created a world in which more people CAN be smarter than was ever possible in the pre-web world. We still have to work hard at enriching our minds, but it is now easier than it was before.
Stan Schroeder
· 2 years ago
Hey John, thanks for a great response. As I've said, it's not only about intelligence. It's also about our ability to do stuff without technology. We might need some of those again in the future, although no one wants to admit it.
the count
· 2 years ago
But beware that different search engines return entirely different result sets - try your google searches in altavista and note the differences. I've found some really great sites on altavista that google never found.
Not just that maybe google returned it as the 1 millionth entry that I never got around to, but searches that return a few dozen, or even a few hundred, and I actually do go through the whole list, and the results are just different.
Google may claim to index the entire web, but clearly there is something going on there that causes them to not display every site meeting a given search criteria.
The point being that just because you googled for something doesn't mean you necessarily got all, or even the best, results possible. There could be other websites out there that would better serve your needs that google won't/can't tell you about.
Rely too heavily on google at your own peril. At a minimum, use multiple search engines for anything really important to you.
(Although obviously things like currency conversions and metric to english conversions don't need to be double checked)
Siiilon
· 2 years ago
I am very divergent thinking person and i had dramatic problems to even finnish technical university with my memmory problems. But, after I started to actively use "internet" and gathering info from it through "google" I start to really learn, seeing many opinions on the same topic, judging possibilities through math - oh yes because google lovely interprets the world of "statistics and possibility" so I am loading my brain permanently with 1st class of information. I like to draw and love the old ways to do it (pencil, charcoal and such), but if tablet substitute traditional tools (and I think it allready did in huge number of areas) it is for a good reason. Evlution is the smartest brain and fortunately with don't control it :)
Danyal
· 2 years ago
Slightly true, slightly untrue. Easy access to information makes you smarter in some ways (you have quicker access to more interesting realms of thought) and dumber in other ways (you're not so good at the lower-level stuff any more). High five.
Kristoffer
· 2 years ago
So, thats whay you're still using that increadibly stupid pound/feet system. Too keep us from getting dumber.
Thank you Google for saving me from learning medival weight-systems.
Siiilon
· 2 years ago
:D
Juwar
· 2 years ago
I rarely use google anymore to find information. I think wikipedia.org is gaining ground. If anyone needs a starting point for research, wikipedia is the best.
Siiilon
· 2 years ago
wikipedia and google are two different things. Wikipedia is information database and google is searching tool. I acces wikipedia most of the time, but usualy I reach any topic through google.
Brandon
· 2 years ago
Well then we can now equate Google to modern society's "calculator" - people before calculators, my great-grandmother for instance, can do math problems, even rather complex ones, nearly as quickly as we could search for a calculator, pick it up, and punch in the required formula. Likewise, people before Google have, at one time or another, looked information up and actually STORED it rather than remembering how they looked it up.
Christopher P. Kile
· 2 years ago
You note this change as if it started happening just yesterday. Before the printing press made books cheap enough for everyone to have access, your ability to use book knowledge depended on your memory of the book. Back then, scholars and savants built their "memory house" and wallpapered it with remembered pictures, descriptions, concepts, procedures, and algorithms from the books they'd read; the best of these could actually read these pages from a "palace of memory" tapestried with every page they'd ever read (a skill rare in that time and very rare these days).
We don't require these memory skills as much as we used to, and it IS a weakness: Often when your survival or your well-being is suddenly put in jeopardy, Google isn't handy. Even when Google is handy, and as good as Google is, you have to learn how to get it to focus for you (just as you had to with earlier search engines) to get the best effect, and that often requires developing AND remembering "rules-of-thumb" to help you do this.
simon
· 2 years ago
umm... isn't this how google is making us dumber, rather than why google is making us dumber? or are they doing it intentionally?
i should google it to find out...
John Hancock
· 2 years ago
Thanks for the clarification, Stan. Yes, my reply was a bit off the real point of your post, which was that we are losing the skills of memory. As a member of probably the last memorising generation in the developed world, I have to agree with you.
One of the characters in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s "Breakfast of Champions" (a boomer classic!) is a young African med student in the USA. Back home, in a pre-literary culture, he had been the person of his generation who, according to tradition, had to memorise all of his family’s ancestors, going back over 100 generations. The young med student is far from his native village, in an alien land, homesick and horny, but he was able to cope because he was constantly “…swimming in a river of ancestorsâ€.
Compared to this kind of monumental, prehistoric intelligence, looking up our family tree on a website doesn’t make us “dumber†than Vonnegut’s African med student, but it certainly makes us more banal. It doesn’t change the way we live or who we are, in the way his total recall of thousands of forebears made him profoundly different from his classmates.
Returning from past fiction to present reality, I and others my age seem to spot “thinking†errors in spreadsheet analyses and financial reports more easily than our young associates. Most of the oldies agree it’s because we learned arithmetic by rote memorisation, then performed long calculations by hand, using pencil and paper. We developed mental images of the logical and arithmetical “shapes†of complicated problems, frankly to help us spot errors without having to go over every single calculation.
We also developed – and many of us still carry – mental images of geographical, historical, and scientific information. Returning to the Google issue, those mental images allow me to find more information, better information, faster on the net than the youngest and most web-savvy kids in the office. Things I memorised 50 years ago in primary school make me a far better proofreader than the spell-checker and grammar-checker tools in any word-processing package.
Your thesis is that carrying this stuff around in our heads makes us baby boomers “smarter.†(At least those of us who didn’t forget everything during the ‘60s or subsequently dumb down by abusing Google.) I’m still uncomfortable with “smarter,†but I do believe anybody who has memorised a lot of facts and stories is a bit like Vonnegut’s young African med student. We enjoy a “richer†or “deeper†experience of what we see, hear, and read, than do those whose educations focused on accessing single-use information, whether online or through other media, then discarding it from their memories after it had served its purpose.
Anyway, thank you again for letting me participate in this discussion thread. Whether it’s made me smarter or dumber I could care less. It has certainly enriched my life.
Nathan
· 2 years ago
I'd have to go with no.
Google is a fantastic reference.
Lawyers don't memorize all the laws. They have books to reference. Accountants don't memorize every formula, etc. they keep reference books so they can look it up when they need to, Google is used in the same manner. Most things we use Google to do in a reference sense are things we've already had experience with. If anything, Google allows us to be more productive by allowing us to focus more specifically on the task at hand.
IAMTHEWIN
· 2 years ago
Today I googled for 10 minutes to find a way to fake Red Hat on CentOS.
Without google I would have ended up installing M$ 2003 (which is pretty darn far from open source). Thank you Google - I love you.
All problems are simple once you find the solution. This is what google is about - solve your problem in the shortest ammount of time. Does Google make people dumb? Don't ask me, ask Google.
Sincerely
Jan
Alzheimers
· 2 years ago
Completely disagree. There is a difference between remembering things and problem solving. I try to use my brain for handling problems that I can not solve using exiting tools. If computers could compose the music I compose or solve the math problems I am working with I would immediately switch to some other problem area. Pardon me for not reading all preceeding posts.
Cactus Wren
· 2 years ago
I am amazed at the number of people who would rather Google than think. They won't be among the survivors when the electricity goes out.
Dimitri
· 2 years ago
Despite brilliancy of google seachengine, Google Inc themselves is dumb and having no idea what is happening in they own department, same as in any corporation. Googlebay exercise is to test whether ignorance of customer support to resolve $50 AdWords issue is a local or global corporate vulnerability. Details see at http://rytsk.com/googlebay/
Ralf Klamma
· 1 year ago
I agree that google is changing the way we think like the calculator changed the way we do calculations. My decisive question was and is always what do I need to know to survive on an island as a castaway, not alone but with a group of people (hey, I'm a social being in the end). My inspiration for this is the novel "The mysterious island" by Jules Verne. You can read a summary at wikipedia :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island (another mind changing technology). BTW, the mysterious island together with some other elements like the X-Files is the blueprint for the TV show "Lost". I was fascinated by the fact that the group was able to engineer and produce very powerful goods like gun powder only from their theoretical and practical knowledge in a hostile environment. The likelihood of getting lost on an island is very small but you may ask yourself after reading the novel if you could similar things.
I think its all how u take the things. The perspective we look at. We cant say tht Newton and Einsten came up with all theories using google. They used their pen and paper. Even after lots of evolutions in many years now, do you think we are coming up with more sofisticated theories now also just because we have got good technologies and google. No right. Not all the NASA scientists use google to do their calculations. But still their are doing their jobs perfectly and very well. Do u think if these people start using google they would hav done more better. I think NO.
So using google help us to make things easy not dumps.
Dimitri Rytsk
· 1 year ago
Applying a system control theory to human-internet-reality chain we may consider such a system as a filter. It is an active filter with deep positive loop (response time delay close to 0) by only few parameters (clicks, popularity) of the filtered vector (human identity vector). A negative (stabilizing) loop is still very slow! (None electronic methods of human connections: conventional laws, morals, and word of mouth with a response time up to few years!). Such a phase and dept of positive feedback lead to induction by the looped value (clicks=popularity). The world becomes popularized! That is why we have got spike of popular (majority=peasants) values: over consumption, pornography, drugs just after given Net to public (HTML) and net searches based on popularity in late 90s. A system is in at the beginning (exponential stage) of oscillation (less then 90 degrees phase). Uncontrolled, the spike should last up to a limit of energy source (oil, food). If alternative sources of energy not found a spike should go to 0 (death). If found, oscillation should continue trough negative phase and spike and so on so on … of cause we have fluctuations of other none looped (by the net) values too but not as much. That is why we think and feel same as years ago. But Google already took projects in human design as well (biomechanics).
In simple terms – Google is a self-inducing loop, a disastrous cancer of the Internet. It is like when your put mic near a speaker your will get very load noise trashing the music…. The scary part is … the amplifier (Earth) is overheating now. We do not have time for a kid to learn how to play before the gig began. The stage was not erected for him. Do we have a main fuse or cut off switch at least?
aussiebones
· 1 year ago
To balance things out, how about a French version...Googaul....whatever you try to look up...it just tells you how stupid you are
Tony
· 1 year ago
Agree, I use Gmail alot and there is certainly some truth in it.
Akathorn
· 1 year ago
We used to know how to make fire. Now we have lighters.
We used to look at the sky to know the time. Now we have watches.
We used to know how to grow our food. Now we have supermarkets.
Are we stupider? Or just more efficient?
Dimitri
· 1 year ago
.... Are we stupider? Or just more efficient? ..... more efficient consumers
Knowbody
· 7 months ago
I'm going to stop using Google. I'm also going to stop buying food at grocery stores because it's made me forget how to plant a garden. Oh, and I'm going to stop shopping at the Gap because I've never learned how to sew.
All Comments
Sorry to disagree with your entire article so vehemently, but using google to look up a phone number, website or convert pounds to kilos is less of an evolutionary mind number than when the abacus and then the calculater first came out to help people with their math.
No need to remember the times table anymore. Take out the calculater and 12 x 12 instantly becomes 144, each and every time result guaranteed until the batteries die.
Did the world witness a huge loss in brain power over the loss of the need to memorise the times table??
No. Instead, it actually led to an increase in brain power by allowing us mortals to use our brains for what really is important and for what no calculator, computer or google will ever replace..........the gift of logic coupled with ingenuity........which is why we have companies like Google in the first place, and why we have bio tech companies making huge advances in medical science that is beathtaking to say the least.
So if tapping in a web addresss in the google seach bar frees up some space in our brains to work on somthing a little more complicated than remembering a URL.......so be it!!!!
Next humans will want to just be able to think of something and see it pop up. Technology does make a few things easier, but if we get dependent on it then I feel the "majority" become spoiled from the convenience it provides.
I've found that my handwriting has gotten worse, ever since I started writing emails instead of letters. Hey, maybe we should just do away with writing altogether and destroy all pens and pencils! Everyone should have a laptop.
Art schools don't need easels or paintbrushes, just install Photoshop or GIMP!
To be fair, you have indeed mentioned the possibilities that it may not be that bad a thing....but we do disagree on the eventual outcome....which is fine!!
Its what makes the world go round and provides for thought provoking debate.
Thank you Sir
My wife's very happy every time I get a new gmail account, LOL.
Talk about monopoly on control of information. It's pretty scary. I no longer trust google to not be evil and am trying hard to break my habit of relying on it so much.
Sorry. I agree that it gives us the POTENTIAL for doing better things with our brains, but looking at what the vast majority of people are actually doing, that potential is not be realized in the vast majority of cases.
People do not make good encyclopaedias. Why go to a lot of information to remember very specific facts when a computer is far better at it? Did you ever really know that a kilogram was 0.45359237 pounds, or did you only remember a far more approximate value? As long as you know how to find the information you need then you will be fine.
When companies sent the "1st level" work overseas, the idea was the us here in the "developed countries" could move on to bigger and better things.
Is it the same with Google? Does using Google search to find the ratio of F to C in temperature allow us to move on?
Let me try another analogy. Back in the old days, everyone wrote HTML by hand. Then these fancy (crappy) programs came along to write HTML for you. As I taught more and more people how to write HTML, I explained that you must learn how to do it first on your own by hand and then if you decide to use a program, fine. (I don't use any program even today.)
The same should go for most any technology or thing. Learn how it works first, spend time understanding it. Then you want to use a shortcut, fine.
The Internet has made people stupider because it allows people to forget to use their brain.
There is that old saying about teaching a kid how to milk a cow, but I forgot it! Maybe I should use Google to find it.
This allowed people to concentrate on coding, and made the web more interactive (this is what's called the Web 2.0). This is the way any evolution goes.
My kids will still learn tables, still learn the conversions and capital cities..But late in the night when they are asleep and when I have to confirm what the capital city of Yemen is, I'll go Google it up!
Now considering the way we live today, the heavy usage of a few fingers to type or use the mouse, a part of the brain to use the logics, and losing the ability to memorize things (forget Presidents, capital cities.. most of us can't even remember a friend's phone number since the cell phones became so common).. just think of the shape of the humans of the future. I always see humans that resemble the aliens in most sci-fi movies. Huge head, 2 or 3 fingers, huge eyes, and and over-all dumb look!!!!
Pete, I'm with you on this one. And also Amith. And Martin. And ... wait, I've forgotten who else I agree with, let me Google it ...
If you enjoy that paper I would recommend you check out these two books:
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence by Andy Clark
and
Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins
____
"Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head!"
And if anyone wants to know why "search this site" is better than most of the in-site searches? Try finding a product on Epinions.com using their in-house designed search, then try Google. Half the time, their search says a product isn't even ON the site. It's a time-waster, and more likely to make me leave the site. Google isn't making me dumber; it's helping me search smarter.
Often Google's search is better, even when Google powers sites' search. Ahh, the irony.
I have no problem with external memory storage for my brain.
These aspects of technology make finding the information we need easier, so we spend less time searching and more time learning.
Can you name all fifty states and place them on a map? No? But you can figure out what keywords to use to find a labeled map of the US using a search engine, right?
db
For example, I was looking up the site of the nearest volcanic activity to my home (which is very far away from any at all, being on the eastern side of the US) and google brought up various places out in the western part of the country - Yellowstone being the closest. But then I had the thought that the Caribbean seems like a likely candidate for volcanic activity as well, and it might just be closer than Yellowstone. Low, there in the West Indies was a site 200 miles closer than Yellowstone. If I didn't already have some idea about the geography of the western hemisphere, I would have been content with google's first set of results showing Yellowstone as the closest. Google tries to be smart - it probably thought since I had a US ip address I was interested in results in the US, but I wanted a broader search result than that.
I actually get that quite a lot - google's attempts to be "smart" by returning results based on the geography of my IP address frequently causes me no end of frustration. I'd just as soon it wasn't so "smart" and just returned exactly what I asked for, not what it thinks I really meant to ask for.
That's another hidden danger in google that doesn't get talked about nearly often enough.
inventions or insights are a result of combining known things into something new.
The catalyst could be a new piece of information (which could be found through google :)
If 1 is to lazy to fill the brain with information 1 is only consuming and not creating
Claiming that the ability of a person to think or memorize basic mathematics or facts is being destroyed because we, as a society, have a tendency to use Google to find out facts we don't remember, and warranting this with the fact that we don't remember urls, but rather Google strings, is logically tenuous at best.
Further, the fact that we remember google strings over urls is not exactly a problem. Using Google over a websites own search is not only not a problem, but is either not a bad idea, as Google is usually more effective, or is no different, as many websites simply use a form of Google themselves when you search.
Saying that inability to look something up on google is a problem is again without any merit. How many times have you not known a spelling or definition, and been a tad irked because you lack a dictionary? Saying that a lack of some knowledge being aggravating is a problem caused by google is a totally nonviable claim, as it has no problem nor logical link.
Finally, using the best tool available IS NOT A PROBLEM. If it's faster to Google a conversion than to bust out some paper, and do the calculation, then doing it with Google is not an example of you getting dumber. Rather it is, in the grand tradition of reality, simply using the full available toolset that life provides.
kthnxbai.
Dead tree companies like O'Reilly are the ones who have a lot to fear.
Had made my already atrocious spelling even worse :(
Each new tool allowed, even encouraged, me to develop ideas that would simply never have occurred to me before the tool became available. In this sense, I would say that internet search engines have made me a "smarter" researcher in the same way that MacDraw made me a "smarter" designer, and Excel made me a "smarter" manager.
And having spent countless hours in real libraries searching through real newspapers, real magazines and real books, I can state categorically that the web and its search engines make you smarter faster. Google lets me find information from more different starting points. It sends me off on more interesting side journeys, where the real gems often lie. It also throws up more chaff and misdirection, but hey, that's research.
The unreliability of much of the information on the web has made serious researchers "smarter" about finding additional sources. An abundance of unreliable information also forces you to think harder about what you discover. Can you trust this information? Does it make sense? Does it square with everything else you've found? Well, that depends on "A" and "B" and "C", doesn't it?
This is the essence of intelligence, and I belive Google et al have created a world in which more people CAN be smarter than was ever possible in the pre-web world. We still have to work hard at enriching our minds, but it is now easier than it was before.
Not just that maybe google returned it as the 1 millionth entry that I never got around to, but searches that return a few dozen, or even a few hundred, and I actually do go through the whole list, and the results are just different.
Google may claim to index the entire web, but clearly there is something going on there that causes them to not display every site meeting a given search criteria.
The point being that just because you googled for something doesn't mean you necessarily got all, or even the best, results possible. There could be other websites out there that would better serve your needs that google won't/can't tell you about.
Rely too heavily on google at your own peril. At a minimum, use multiple search engines for anything really important to you.
(Although obviously things like currency conversions and metric to english conversions don't need to be double checked)
Thank you Google for saving me from learning medival weight-systems.
We don't require these memory skills as much as we used to, and it IS a weakness: Often when your survival or your well-being is suddenly put in jeopardy, Google isn't handy. Even when Google is handy, and as good as Google is, you have to learn how to get it to focus for you (just as you had to with earlier search engines) to get the best effect, and that often requires developing AND remembering "rules-of-thumb" to help you do this.
i should google it to find out...
One of the characters in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s "Breakfast of Champions" (a boomer classic!) is a young African med student in the USA. Back home, in a pre-literary culture, he had been the person of his generation who, according to tradition, had to memorise all of his family’s ancestors, going back over 100 generations. The young med student is far from his native village, in an alien land, homesick and horny, but he was able to cope because he was constantly “…swimming in a river of ancestorsâ€.
Compared to this kind of monumental, prehistoric intelligence, looking up our family tree on a website doesn’t make us “dumber†than Vonnegut’s African med student, but it certainly makes us more banal. It doesn’t change the way we live or who we are, in the way his total recall of thousands of forebears made him profoundly different from his classmates.
Returning from past fiction to present reality, I and others my age seem to spot “thinking†errors in spreadsheet analyses and financial reports more easily than our young associates. Most of the oldies agree it’s because we learned arithmetic by rote memorisation, then performed long calculations by hand, using pencil and paper. We developed mental images of the logical and arithmetical “shapes†of complicated problems, frankly to help us spot errors without having to go over every single calculation.
We also developed – and many of us still carry – mental images of geographical, historical, and scientific information. Returning to the Google issue, those mental images allow me to find more information, better information, faster on the net than the youngest and most web-savvy kids in the office. Things I memorised 50 years ago in primary school make me a far better proofreader than the spell-checker and grammar-checker tools in any word-processing package.
Your thesis is that carrying this stuff around in our heads makes us baby boomers “smarter.†(At least those of us who didn’t forget everything during the ‘60s or subsequently dumb down by abusing Google.) I’m still uncomfortable with “smarter,†but I do believe anybody who has memorised a lot of facts and stories is a bit like Vonnegut’s young African med student. We enjoy a “richer†or “deeper†experience of what we see, hear, and read, than do those whose educations focused on accessing single-use information, whether online or through other media, then discarding it from their memories after it had served its purpose.
Anyway, thank you again for letting me participate in this discussion thread. Whether it’s made me smarter or dumber I could care less. It has certainly enriched my life.
Google is a fantastic reference.
Lawyers don't memorize all the laws. They have books to reference. Accountants don't memorize every formula, etc. they keep reference books so they can look it up when they need to, Google is used in the same manner. Most things we use Google to do in a reference sense are things we've already had experience with. If anything, Google allows us to be more productive by allowing us to focus more specifically on the task at hand.
Without google I would have ended up installing M$ 2003 (which is pretty darn far from open source). Thank you Google - I love you.
All problems are simple once you find the solution. This is what google is about - solve your problem in the shortest ammount of time. Does Google make people dumb? Don't ask me, ask Google.
Sincerely
Jan
Pardon me for not reading all preceeding posts.
Googlebay exercise is to test whether ignorance of customer support to resolve $50 AdWords issue is a local or global corporate vulnerability.
Details see at http://rytsk.com/googlebay/
My decisive question was and is always what do I need to know to survive on an island as a castaway, not alone but with a group of people (hey, I'm a social being in the end). My inspiration for this is the novel "The mysterious island" by Jules Verne. You can read a summary at wikipedia :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island (another mind changing technology). BTW, the mysterious island together with some other elements like the X-Files is the blueprint for the TV show "Lost". I was fascinated by the fact that the group was able to engineer and produce very powerful goods like gun powder only from their theoretical and practical knowledge in a hostile environment. The likelihood of getting lost on an island is very small but you may ask yourself after reading the novel if you could similar things.
Not all the NASA scientists use google to do their calculations. But still their are doing their jobs perfectly and very well. Do u think if these people start using google they would hav done more better. I think NO.
So using google help us to make things easy not dumps.
In simple terms – Google is a self-inducing loop, a disastrous cancer of the Internet. It is like when your put mic near a speaker your will get very load noise trashing the music…. The scary part is … the amplifier (Earth) is overheating now. We do not have time for a kid to learn how to play before the gig began. The stage was not erected for him. Do we have a main fuse or cut off switch at least?
Now we have lighters.
We used to look at the sky to know the time.
Now we have watches.
We used to know how to grow our food.
Now we have supermarkets.
Are we stupider?
Or just more efficient?
..... more efficient consumers