Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 9

Gray area: Google’s truthiness problem

I never realized that the guy who wrote Straw Dogs is the very same guy who wrote Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Sometimes it boggles the mind what you discover through Google:

The absurdity of confusing these two writers is priceless, but Google’s cavalier willingness to allow its algorithms to publish misinformation and nonsense does raise important questions, both epistemological and ethical. Is it OK to run an AI when you know that it will spread falsehoods to the public — and...

Gray area

I never realized that the guy who wrote Straw Dogs is the very same guy who wrote Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Sometimes it boggles the mind what you discover through Google:

The absurdity is priceless, but Google’s cavalier willingness to allow its algorithms to spread misinformation and nonsense does raise important questions, both epistemological and ethical. Is it OK to run an AI when you know that it will spread falsehoods to the public — and on a massive scale? Is it OK to...

Being there

I have an essay, “The World Beyond the Screen,” in the catalog for the current exhibition Being There at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The essay begins:

The paradox of modern media is that in opening the world to us, it removes us from the world. To enjoy the informational and recreational bounties of the networked screen, whether it’s a television, a personal computer, or a smartphone, we have to withdraw from our immediate physical and social surroundings. Our mind, with i...

How smartphones hijack our minds

So you bought that new iPhone. If you’re like the typical owner, you’ll be pulling your phone out and using it some 80 times a day, according to data Apple collects. That means you’ll be consulting the glossy little rectangle nearly 30,000 times over the coming year. Your new phone, like your old one, will become your constant companion and trusty factotum — your teacher, secretary, confessor, guru. The two of you will be inseparable.

The smartphone is something new in the world. We keep the...

Design for misuse

Last Friday, New Yorker editor David Remnick interviewed Apple design chief Jony Ive as part of the magazine’s TechFest. Midway through the conversation came an interesting (and widely reported) exchange in which Ive expressed some regret about people’s use of his most celebrated creation, the iPhone:

Remnick: There’s a ubiquity about the iPhone and its imitators. And I wonder, … do you have any sense of how much you’ve changed life and the way daily life is lived, and the way our brains wor...

iPhone: designed for misuse?

Last Friday, New Yorker editor David Remnick interviewed Apple design chief Jony Ive as part of the magazine’s TechFest. Midway through the conversation came an interesting (and widely reported) exchange in which Ive expressed some regret about people’s use of his most celebrated creation, the iPhone:

Remnick: There’s a ubiquity about the iPhone and its imitators. And I wonder, … do you have any sense of how much you’ve changed life and the way daily life is lived, and the way our brains wor...

Apples and atoms

The long conversation in the New York Review between Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks is bearing fruit:

Manzotti: The view that only the smallest constituents, atoms, are “real” is called smallism in science, or nihilism in philosophy, and it clashes with everyday experience and common sense in the most blatant way. As Democritus suggests, it’s self-defeating because it is conducted only with the aid of the senses, which it claims have no reality. The world we live in is a world of objects. A...

The robots we deserve

This essay appeared originally, in a slightly shorter form and under the headline “These Are Not the Robots We Were Promised,” in the New York Times.

“Your domestic problems are completely solved.” So says a robotics technician to a grateful housewife in “Leave It to Roll-Oh,” a promotional film produced by the Chevrolet Motor Company for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The titular star of the picture, a “chromium-plated butler,” is an ambulatory automaton that looks like a beefy version of...

We get the robots we deserve

This essay appeared originally, in a slightly shorter form and under the headline “These Are Not the Robots We Were Promised,” in the New York Times.

“Your domestic problems are completely solved.” So says a robotics technician to a grateful housewife in “Leave It to Roll-Oh,” a promotional film produced by the Chevrolet Motor Company for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The titular star of the picture, a “chromium-plated butler,” is an ambulatory automaton that looks like a beefy version of...

What they have wrought

Paul Lewis has a sharp, ominous article in this weekend’s Guardian about the misgivings some prominent Silicon Valley inventors are feeling over what they’ve created. Alumni from Google, Twitter, and Facebook worry that the products they helped design and market are having dire side effects, creating a society of compulsive, easily manipulated screen junkies.

Lewis describes how seemingly small design elements ended up having big effects on people’s behavior, from Facebook’s introduction of t...