The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

by Nicholas Carr

A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “us[e] technology to solve problems that have never been solved before,”57 and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it? Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by artificial intelligence is as unsettling as it is revealing. It underscores the firmness and the certainty with which Google holds to its Taylorist belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. “Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made,” the twentieth-century philosopher Günther Anders once observed, and in the pronouncements of Google’s founders we can sense that shame as well as the ambition it engenders.58 In Google’s world, which is the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive—and better algorithms to steer the course of its thought. “Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer network...

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