Is Google Making Us Smarter?

1. Thesis: Google, along with many other technological tools that are becoming more prevalent, are advancing the evolution of our brains.

2. I can see where the author is coming from with a lot of his ideas about how Web 2.0 and other innovations in technology will effectively solve many present problems and evolve our world into a better place. I do think, however, that much of his ideas are simply conjecture, musings as to how the future will turn up. I think his opinion is clear, that technology will solve our problems and create a more highly attuned, collective augmentation of the human mind and society as a whole. While I appreciate a lot of his insight, I think that his ideas for solutions are short-sighted and narrow. For example, he talks about a technologically-induced attention deficit disorder that people develop from exposure to media and technology. His answer seems to be that those people should just take Adderall or Ritalin or the next frontier drugs that heightens cognitive thinking level to combat their ADD problem. This seems to me that we are solving problems with yet even greater problems. And this is exactly why I think his argument is flawed. By building up infrastructure and new technologies to solve present problems, we are avoiding some of the ultimate overlying issues. If we were to put all of our chickens into a basket and believe that technology is going to answer our problems and, even more, advance us into a new smarter, heightened civilization, what would we do with problems such as preserving biodiversity? Or, is that not part of his vision at all. Maybe I am beating a dead horse here, but where does environmentalism or sustainability fit into these arguments? Are we magically going to invent something that turns trash into compost? Pollution into clean air and water? Or industrial wastelands into rainforests?

Despite my skepticism, I do agree with a lot of what the author has to say. Although a lot of what he draws from is science fiction writers, he definite has some interesting and thought-provoking points. The computing power of machines is phenomenal and is constantly improving. We can now take patterns and trends and simulate future outputs like never before. We can also connect to each other more instantaneously than ever. There is more information that is shared every day on the internet and it opens up more voices and opinions, that in total create a greater shared accumulation of knowledge.