Reading Response 5

In Nick Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Carr explains his thoughts and views on why and how technology and the Internet and the media are taking over our minds and how we are simply letting our natural intelligence be taken over. Carr claims that "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." He seems to be saying that the Internet and technology and media are taking over his own thoughts and that his brain is being altered by what the Internet throws at him. Carr supports his theories with multiple sources of evidence, one of them being Scott Karp, a writer who blogs about online media, who states “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?” Karp seems to be conveying the message that what we read on the internet is beginning to change the ways we think about what we are reading, and that the way we truly want to think can never be displayed because it gets altered. Another textual piece of evidence that Carr uses is from Larry Page, one of the founders of the popular Internet searcher Google, who claims that “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people — or smarter...For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” What Page is saying here is that our brains need to be better than the information that is thrown at us. Further along in the article, Page says that "An artificial intelligence would make us better off." This clearly states that Page believes that if humans could harbor artificial intelligence, we would be smarter than any piece of technology out there, and we would know every piece of information without having to use the Internet to find what we want to know. After reading this article, it seems to me that the Internet and technology and media are becoming too advanced for our minds, and that someday it might just take over our minds - literally. The internet does not have to become so much more advanced that we cannot think on our own or obtain knowledge on our own. Our brains do that for us, and that is what we need them for. Artificial intelligence would destroy our purpose as human beings. We would just become another piece of technology. We would ultimately lose our culture and our ways of working together as a society. If anyone has seen the movie I Robot, I believe that is how our world would be if we were created in to humans with artificial intelligence. It's absurd to destroy the human race like that, and I for one am not alright with the Internet and technolgy, even today.