Google Making Us Dumber?

Lots of press on this article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic: Is Google Making us Stupid?. Just got to it. He makes some good points ... hyperlinks are not like footnotes, 'they propel you to related works'. Are new forms of reading as 'power browsing' emerging? In fact I am irritated now when an author does not give me links to source works, they are doing that to keep me in their space, I want to get to the primary information. The Web is made richer as a linked environment.

At the end of the article he covers some of the points he made in his recent book The Big Switch, that Google is AI-obsessed and is using a modern day Taylorism to find the one-best-way to solve the world's problems. I think that is taking it too far. Google is trying to find the one best way that they can make profits. He further points out that there were similar fears about the spread of literacy and then the printing press. The potential evils of these technologies were worried over, but the benefits were not understood.

In the end Carr worries and is 'haunted' about the changes he sees. Worth a read, but I think he overplays his fears. We adapted to the spread of writing and the printing press and it seems are the better for it in total knowledge. Above and at the right, the Ramelli Book Wheel, circa 1588.