Is Increased Connectivity Dumbing Us Down?
I just finished reading “Get Smarter”, an article by Jamais Cascio in The Atlantic, and am left tingling with anticipation. A brave new era full of innovative intelligence, augmented thought patterns, and an ever deepening sense of the world around us is developing as I type.
Cascio argues that this age of hyper-connectivity, instead of “dumbing” us down, is actually spurring our brains to evolve to meet the challenge. We’ve done it before, he says, and we will do it again, only now we have powerful tools such as the internet, smart drugs, and artificial intelligences to help us along.
Forget the idea that technology decreases our natural ability to think, instead wrap your mind around the concept that it’s helping us to make more intricate connections and recognize increasingly elaborate patterns. This shift isn’t taking away our intelligence, but changing it to fit our evolving environment.
These skills are referred to as “fluid intelligence”, what Cascio calls “the ability to find meaning in confusion and to solve new problems independent of acquired knowledge”. It’s not that we have too much information available, Cascio says, it’s that we are just beginning to develop the necessary tools to process it.
Put away your fears of losing your livelihood to advanced computer systems because “intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity” – in short, the jobs of the future will allow for more people to perform them as advanced technologies will fill in the knowledge gaps.
What about classroom learning? There was a day (and in some places, still is) when calculator use was considered cheating. Now our children use computers at their desks, mobile phones for instant information retrieval, and social applications for study groups. Yes, these tools are becoming “smarter”, but so are the children who grow up using them. As Cascio says, “the same advances in processor and process that would produce a machine mind would also increase the power of our own cognitive-enhancement technologies”.
“Our ability to build the future that we want,” Cascio ends with, “- not just a future we can survive – depends on our capacity to understand the complex relationships of the world’s systems.”
I, for one, agree. What do you think?
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