Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” explores his claim that the way individuals process information is being disrupted and affected by the Internet. Carr begins with the example of HAL, the supercomputer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, having its memory circuits calmly and coldly disconnected by Dave Bowman, who was nearly killed by the computer. Carr unequivocally puts prominence on the fact that as Bowman stripped HAL of its memory circuits, it could “feel” its artificial “brain” and mind slowly slipping away to set the tone of his theory. Carr describes how since he began using the Internet, his mind has become much more inconsistent. Not with a feeling of his mind slowly going, but knowing that he’s “not

Carr introduces what sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”, defined as the way in which humans “inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies,” further backing up this study. He uses the gripping example of a mechanical clock as additional support. Carr states that in “deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.” This introduced the outlook of the brain operating “like clockwork”, and in what’s now known as the “age of software,” the brain is thought of as operating “like computers.”

The view is then turned to Google, where the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page openly declare their aspiration to create the “ultimate search engine [that] is something as smart as people—or smarter.” With the belief that they’re indisputably working to uncover simulated intelligence on a gargantuan scale, or even to solve the presently unsolvable comes the motivation to keep trying. Carr emphasizes his worry by saying this “suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and