What is a situation where technology has made the average person more dependent or perhaps even dumber in a situation where they don't have access to the tech? I know your stance is quite the opposite based on the preview I've read and the audio book excerpt on chess grand masters vs. supercomputers. How would you view the dependence situation in a different light to support your stance that tech + humans is better for our minds?
@kunalslab Oh, there definitely are ways in which our modern technologies can corrode our thought! The big one is distraction.
As I like to say, your mobile phone isn't really *your* mobile phone: It's a portal through which five or six multinational social-network corporations are trying to get you to stop doing whatever you're doing and come stare at them, so they can sell you ads, heh. For Facebook, Twitter, Google, and plenty of other firms, distraction is central to their business model! And of course, we now have copious evidence that distraction is bad for quality of thinking. Once you start "task switching" from one thing to another, it becomes pretty hard to internalize anything, remember it deeply, and make sense of it.
To use today's thinking tools well, we have to wrest back control of our attention from all these corporate forces. It's not easy! But it's not *impossible*, either -- it just takes some mindfulness, paying attention to your attention. I wrote a bit about this recently in an essay about what it was like to read "War and Peace" on my iphone: http://bookriot.com/quarterly/bk...
Since writing STYT, virtual reality has gone from a promising experiment to being the cusp of something huge.
I've already had some success in curating my thoughts by entering certain VR environments: in the same way you'd think about a problem differently in a park than to an office with flickering lights.
What excites you the most about the possibilities of this new medium?
@darklordandy
VR: This is a great question! But honestly, I'm not sure.
I have some intuitions. The obvious early stuff is going to be telepresence -- "being" somewhere in real-time. There are people already working on broadcasting live 3D imagery to VR from all sorts of fun crazy places: courtside at wimbledon, remote areas that are hard to access, drone views.
But in a way, I'm most interested in it as a new thinking tool. What types of ideas or information or communications can we wrestle with using VR? That probably includes anything that has a spatial dimension; not just the obvious things -- like architecture, fly-throughs, etc. -- but the less obvious, like data visualization. (Imagine a 3D dataviz you could walk around in!)
If you really wanted to know what's going to happen in that area, though, just look at the video games that people make. Video-game-makers are nearly always the ones that figure out the most useful and delightful way to employ a new interface. Joysticks in the arcades of the 80s taught people the concept of manipulating things on screen with a physical object (a *super* weird concept, back then). Solitaire on the Windows PC probably trained more people and how to use a mouse than any other thing. And it was video games on the iPhone that first explored the limits of what you could do with multitouch controls.
So basically, just watch whatever video-game people do!
Hello Clive. Thanks for doing this AMA. Do you think strong AI is even achievable (in the foreseeable future)? It seems as though creating strong AI is well beyond the current scope of machine learning and there are massive gaps in our understanding of the human mind. So how can we effectively model what we don't fully understand? Human minds aren't just about parallel computation abilities.... the complexity of human emotions tied to real human intelligence seems even much more difficult to fully map and program.
@erictwillis I've been reading Nick Bostrom's book "Superintelligence", which does the best job of anything I've seen speccing out how, precisely, a strong AI -- or generalized AI, capable of general reasoning across tons of domains -- could emerge. Bostrom isn't entirely sure, of course, so much of it is, as he says, highly speculative. So the upshot is I have no idea how AI engineers would get past the hump you're talking about. Years and years ago I wrote about the "common-sense problem" of AI (http://linguafranca.mirror.thein...) -- i.e. the problem of reasoning is that you can't easily start to do it unless you already know a bunch of common-sense info about the world, and the only way humans get that stuff in our heads is by brute-forcing it (staring at the world, interacting with other people, all our waking hours, for years on end). It may well be that there will be brute-force methods like that in AI, or something else we can't envision. But right now, we don't know what they'd be!
There was an Intelligence Squared Debate about whether tech makes you dumber or not - http://intelligencesquaredus.org...
What is your biggest disagreement with, say, Nicholas Carr, who's argued that it is indeed making us dumber?
or rephrased, when does tech make us smarter and when does it make us dumber?
@eriktorenberg Well, let me begin by praising the one thing that Carr got absolutely right in that book, which is his reporting on the problems of distraction -- and his neat dismantling of cult of multitasking. In the years before his book came out, it's almost hard to remember now, but multitasking was often regarded as a *good* thing. There was this idea that when you were juggling twelve things at a time -- seventeen windows open on your computer -- you were somehow operating at your peak intellectual capability. It's more widely known today that this is (mostly) completely and upside-downedly wrong. We have Carr to thank, because his book was the first to tackle this.
Where I disagree with Carr is probably in his insistence that the acme of human thought is reading books immersively, deeply and for hours on end. I certainly agree that uninterrupted, high-concentration book-reading is enormously valuable, intellectually and spiritually; there are types of thoughts you can have -- and can *only* have -- when you're alone with a book for hours and hours.
But book aren't the *only* technology for deep thought. Indeed, for many problems we face in everyday life -- or many creative challenges -- thinking happens best socially, in concert with other people: Talking things over, arguing, asking "hey, does anyone know about X, Y, or Z", and jointly remembering things. This is precisely why teams of people are able to accomplish certain types of intellectual and creative tasks that are beyond the scope of any individual.
We're social animals, and a great deal of our powerful thinking happens socially. This is one of the reasons Socrates was worried about the newfangled technology of his age, writing. Authors often quote the passage in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus in which Socrates mounts a critique of writing, and usually they quote the part where -- channeling a dialogue between Theuth and Thamos -- Socrates describes writing as a danger to memory: If we can write things down, why would we bother to remember anything? But Socrates was also worried about something deeper, which is that if we shifted to reading, it would kill off a lot of person-to-person debate and argument. For him, wisdom was formed in the to-and-fro of a dialogue, where people challenged each other. Socrates understood the social nature of how knowledge was produced.
Whenever I interview people about the impact of the Intertubes on their lives, they inevitably talk about the enormous value of being able to talk other people -- about their hobbies, their lives, their health, whatever. They talk about the epiphanies that unveil themselves in these conversations, the bits of reading they're pointed to. The best conversations, they often tell me, happen in out-of-the-way, less-public, less-trafficked parts of the Internet that are often noncommercial; a great many people have told me about some phpbbs board they belong to devoted to their hobby, where they hang out with the 1,000 other people who care about the same subculture, and the relatively small size and out-of-the-way nature of the board helps it maintain a pretty healthily civil culture. And in places like that, people have truly delightful and enlightening conversations all the time.
I'm a hard-core book addict, so in general, I'm in agreement with Carr that books are powerful, crucial, and the culture around them should be maintained and defended. But they're not the only way we think.
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Hi Clive! Since writing STYT, have you come across any new stories, companies, or people you would have liked to include in the book?
@imchauncey Chauncey! Yes, zomg, yes.
Frankly, even back when I was writing the book, I had to leave out easily 80% of the things I wanted to include. It's pretty funny to go back and look at my early book outlines, because the chapter list is like twice as long as what I actually wrote. As I was writing it -- and as it was dawning on me that I'd bitten off far more than I could chew -- I started throwing less-crucial chapters in the garbage, one by one by one.
One chapter that I really wanted to write was about the prospects for less-centralized networking. Right now, one of the big civic and political and social problems of the way our everyday tools work is at they're very centralized. There's always some huge server in the middle scooping up all our information, and from my conversations with people I know this makes them all very nervous.
Towards the end of the book I got very interested in hackers and startups that were making tools for less-centralized networking -- everything from things like Bittorrent Bleep (an encrypted, peer-to-peer chat app) to "personal cloud" technology that allowed nontechnical people to run their own home server, or even their own social apps on it. I'd originally hoped to end the book with a chapter on the subject, but didn't have space or time to do so. So instead I've been writing about the subject for magazines.
Where do you see how we interact with the office/workspace evolving in the next few years? Specifically with new sensor applications (BLE) and new communication styles (Slack) being adopted.
@brendan_o Everyone in the corporate world complains about overmessaging -- mostly in email. While I don't really foresee any near-term end to email, I do think the popularity of Slack (and tools like it) show that businesses are eager to get away from one-to-one email and towards stuff that's more like conversation. One of the huge benefits of Slack is "knowledge capture": If people are actually having conversations out in the open, where other people can see them, then other people can learn from what we're all talking about. It gets away from the problem that "email is where knowledge goes to die".
One thing I think is happening more and more in the workplace, though, is the tracking of performance -- and even the tracking of physical movement -- of an increasing number of employees. Companies are trying to get a grip on what's happening inside the firm, which is understandable, but there are a lot of privacy nightmares looming, which will only increase as "Internet of things" devices become more common. Over-surveillance has long been a problem in lower-income work; now it's coming to white-collar work too!
It is my pleasure to welcome Clive Thompson for an AMA today at 12 noon - let's ask questions in advance...!
BIO: Clive is a science and technology journalist for the New York Times Magazine and Wired, and author of "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds For the Better." In his spare time, he's a musician with the bands The Delorean Sisters and Cove.
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Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson
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Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson
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Writers Who Don't Write Episode 04: Clive Thompson
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