Does Google Make Us Dumber Or Smarter ?  

While the internet seems to have made a lot of us more scatter-brained and less able to concentrate for extended periods of time, there is also a debate going on about whether or not it is also making us stupider, in the sense that we don't bother remembering things now as we can look them up online when needed.

Kevin Kelly, eternal optimist that he is, wonders if we should take a different view of this,saying we should be asking Will we let Google make us smarter ?.

While Google is wonderful and I'd struggle to live without it, its not perfect as an cybernetic memory aid - linkrot and the memory hole effect can kill off a lot of your outsourced neurons and Google can't do much about it (unless they start keeping everything they scan in Google Cache of course).

Is Google making us stupid?

That's the tiltle of provocator Nick Carr's piece in this month's Atlantic. Carr is a self-admitted worrywart, who joins a long line of historical worrywarts worrying that new technologies are making us stupid. In fact Carr does such a fine job of rounding up great examples of ancient worrywarts getting it all wrong, it's hard to take his own worry seriously. ...

Likewise, is the ocean of short writing the web has generated due to our minds are getting dumber and incapable of paying attention to long articles, as Carr worries, or is it because we finally have a new vehicle and market place for loads of short things, whereas in the past it short was unprofitable to produce in such quantity? I doubt the former and suspect the latter is the better explanation.

Carr begins his piece describing how smarter he is while using Google. What if Carr is right? What if we were getting dumber when we are off Google, but we were getting loads smarter while we were on Google? That doesn't seem improbable, and in fact seems pretty likely.

Question is, do you get off Google or stay on all the time?

I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time.

At least I would.