Nicholas Carr tells us what we likely already know intuitively: the internet, our iPhones, and AI are rewiring our brains.  His book, The Shallows, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, lays out the argument that, while we have a great abundance of information, we are eroding our ability to process it – to think critically about it – by off-loading various tasks to applications sold to us to make our lives easier.  We no longer engage in deep processing because we are quite happy with accepting the answer of a prompt we put into AI.  Our imagination is compromised, our curiosity diminished.  The more we outsource the things that make us human, the less human we become.  And all the while, we remain distracted by the pinging, the alerts, the bells that grab our attention and give us the quick dopamine rush. 

What should alarm us all is that the way we are now finding ourselves was intentional.  There is nothing accidental about this rewiring.  To be sure, if we look at the results even for a minute, we can easily see that an illiterate and unthinking population is the end goal. 

But for whom?  Perhaps the answer is where the money tends to spill. 

But even so, the ramifications of this series of nefarious events are far and wide – beyond merely rendering ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren powerless in the face of those with authentic ideas – ideas meant to horde wealth and power.  Carr writes that “[t]he price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation.  The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies.  the tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities – those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.”  The price we pay for the convenience of technology answering even the slightest of difficult questions is that we willingly surrender some critical part of what it means to be human. 

Why we do this at all is a head scratcher.  Where does this impulse to self-destroy come from?  I can only hazard a guess, dear listeners.  Perhaps being human and the struggle inherent in this condition is too difficult.  Living is hard.  So we take a stroll on easy street never mind the harm it causes us – the harm that, at the time, does not seem like harm at all.  And the result?  Our minds atrophy.  The output of our creative endeavors become infantile.  Conformity is codified into our society.  We become easy to manipulate.  And our culture degrades.  As Carr writes, “culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as the world’s information.  It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the New.  To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation.  Outsource memory, and culture withers.” 

I can only hope that the human spirit will somehow bridle against this evil effort.  I am not sure there would be a Luddite-styled revolution – a violent smashing of the machines – but it is not unreasonable to hold out for a decisive reckoning of a technological trend that is clearly wrecking the minds of young and old alike.  Who among us has silently judged the group whose members are all engrossed in their screens?  Who else has decried the acceptance of being in front of a device the majority of one’s waking hours?  What will become of us when we do not even notice that?  When living digitized lives is the norm? 

We have put all of our eggs into one technological basket.  Will we eventually be so uncritical that we will forget the outcome, the lesson, the consequence of being so tragically myopic in our thinking? 

Nicholas Carr has sounded his alarm.  Let’s hope the day won’t come when we will no longer be able to hear it. 

https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750