C/NET has published the first in a series of articles about “Intelligence in the Internet Age.” The big question is whether “new innovations and technologies make us smarter or just lazily reliant on computers.” Of course, I don’t think offloading brain cycles onto machines is necessarily lazy. And there’s also the related riddle of how to define intelligence in the first place. Still, it’s a deep issue and the article quotes some heavy thinkers like Vint Cerf, Doug Engelbart, Susana Urbina, and Jeff Hawkins, who co-wrote the excellent recent book On Intelligence. From C/NET’s first installment:
“It’s true we don’t remember anything anymore, but we don’t need to,” said Hawkins, the co-founder of Palm Computing and author of a book called “On Intelligence.”
“We might one day sit around and reminisce about having to remember phone numbers, but it’s not a bad thing. It frees us up to think about other things. The brain has a limited capacity, if you give it high-level tools, it will work on high-level problems,” he said…
People feared the invention of the printing press because it would cause people to rely on books for their memory. Today, memory is more irrelevant than ever, argue some academics.
“What’s important is your ability to use what you know well. There are people who are walking encyclopedias, but they make a mess of their lives. Getting a 100 percent on a written driving test doesn’t mean you can drive,” said Robert Sternberg, dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University and a professor of psychology.