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The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized

Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.

He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences.

we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice

Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?”

The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

“systematize everything”

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well.

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency.

It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.”

It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets.

“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,

But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter

And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

“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.”

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.

Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

I think I know what’s going on.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?

malfunctioning machine

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Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?”

brain

Nicholas Carr

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"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?

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