Landing on Earth – “Is the Internet making us stupid?”

I woke up with a strange feeling and realize that “I am not in Kansas anymore”. I am sitting in the pilot’s cabin and try to collect my thoughts and analyze the situation I am in. It seems that my spaceship malfunctioned and it crashed into this unknown to me planet. It looked pale-blue to me as my spaceship was diving towards at an incredible speed and somehow my ship’s advanced data bank systems have no record of the planet. Wind blows through the window and there it is. Several pages stapled together and the title reads “Is Google making us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains?” By Nicholas Carr.

I should first mention that I come from a highly evolved race where we have mastered data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. It took me a few picoseconds to tap into my extended brain, a mix of organic and inorganic matter, and decode a white object with black unintelligible marks into written English. Immediately I realized that something important is happening here when I saw the word brain.

In the early years of my civilization when we had just started to experiment with the augmenting of our brains, with what humans call “drugs,” we almost had a global civil war. Our society was split in two camps, for and against the new “science.”  Some people took the view that this is the beginning of a new race and eventually we will lose out to the machines. Others, while acknowledging the dangers of this new “science and technology,” they maintained that we should see these changes as an evolution of our race.

These “drugs” became more powerful and we started seeing an amazing power and capacity in our brains. The voices of the critics became hysterical when further development of these “drugs” enabled us to extend our brains with inorganic matter. There were many issues with this new “science” at this early stage as we didn’t understand them how they really worked and how to control them. It seemed that our brains were taking a life of their own. Ever more threatening, there was an unexpected discovery by a “brilliant,” others say “evil,” scientist in the field of communications. She developed a way of using wireless technologies to connect the inorganic, let’s call them silicon brains, parts of people’s brains. Then, using them as a bridge, she was able to establish direct communication between people’s brains. We were, for first time, able to have machine-type communication among ourselves. There was still a difference in interpretations as the emotional part in people brains was kept separate and in i.e. the color green still meant a different green for different people. You don’t want to know what followed after this discovery but I hope I will be able to touch on some of the issues later.

Needless to say that the Technology Industry of that time was ecstatic; now they had 6 billion people to sell them security and antivirus software for their brains!

As I said before, there was close to a revolution in my society and we had turned into us against them, not unlike the Luddites of 19^th century Britain. The social movement against the brain technologies became larger and stronger and now they were after everything new. In essence, they wanted to destroy everything that wasn’t organic based and didn’t have a consciousness and return our civilization to the Stone Age. But somewhere around that time the unexpected happened. But where was I? I think I am getting ahead of myself.

Here I am stranded in a strange planet reading a story about how some technology, called Internet, changes people’s minds. For a moment I want to tap into this planet’s information sources and gain knowledge on everything about the planet. Next, I can tap on my extended “brain” which consists of several parts. The main parts are the data warehouse, the heuristics engine, the emotional part, and the universal truths and measures part. Should I tap into all these parts of my brain and gain wisdom about the planet, its people, its history and its evolution and then provide them some advice? As I am ready to push the button to gain the wisdom I need, something tells me otherwise. Maybe it’s an old remnant of my organic circuitry that I can’t control. At least that’s how I explain the strange signal (you call it urge) I get right now.

I should mention here that the major breakthrough in our evolution from Organic to an Organic-Inorganic race was when we discovered how we could control our instincts as well as our brains. We have the ability to shut down our brains or parts of the brain and the only thing that is running is a small part of the heuristics engine and the universal truths and measures. We save energy that way too. This is not to say that we do not have emotions. On the contrary, the emotional part is very important to us and critical in learning in the early stages of our lives (well, we live forever now if we want to, but many people decide to terminate their lives and start a new life) and communicating and understanding amongst us. Although, we share our brains and all the data, it’s the emotional part that gives different interpretations to much of the data where we are dealing with individual preferences. For example, different people like different wines although we all analyze them in exactly the same way. But we communicate these individual differences by sharing emotional states between us. What you call empathy, we take it into the extreme. In essence if I want to fully understand what someone feels when they listen to their favorite music, I load their emotional state and feel exactly like them while at the same time I am maintaining my own identity. I know this is complicated stuff but we should have time to explore these subjects as we go along.

This old circuit in my organic brain tells me how lucky I am and what a great opportunity I have in front of me by crashing in this pale-blue planet. This is an opportunity to go back in time and relive all the great and turbulent times of my race (outside a simulation machine). For simplicity, let’s call my race Pierians. The more I think about the idea the more I get excited. It seems that this guy Carr is asking some legitimate questions but I have a few of my own.

The relevant question here is this; does a society develop a communication method or technology for its needs or a particular communication technology or method creates a specific type of society? Is the Internet more revolutionary than the passing from the oral tradition of the Greeks to the written form in the 9^th/8th century BC? How about the mass market availability of books with the development of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 15^th century? What about the impact of the telegraph, telephone, and the Industrial Revolution on people’s lives of that time? My view, as an alien, is that Carr’s worries are superficial and have nothing to do with the important questions that people of this planet should be asking. These questions are the same questions that humans have being asking since they developed “intelligent calculation” and we will be dealing with them for the next 3 months….and I hope we keep them  for the rest of our lives.