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Intelligence in the Internet Age
ErikPeterson writes to tell us about an article on News.com that takes a look at technology versus intelligence of the general population. From the article: 'Is technology making us smarter? Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?'
Is technology making us smarter? Or are we lazily reliant on computers, and, well, dumber than we used to be?
I don't think it makes us smarter or dumber. What we are smart about changes. We can use technology to do things we could never do before. But there are things we could do in the past that we can't do anymore.Bradley Holt
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/076
I am the very model of a modern major general!
Both points make sense, but I don't think either one is really news to anyone here
exactly... it seemed like it was written because some editor really needed a technology article, fast, and just pulled first thing he could find out of his butt... it didn't really offer anything at all, and when it did, it was all obvious
anyone who grew up in the last 30 years probably remembers wanting to use a calculator in school, and being told we couldn't because we had to learn how to do it first. that's basically still the case, isn't it? technology isn't going to make anyone dumber, unless we opt not to learn things any more.
but really, those people have always been around, and there have always been geeks who want to learn everything anyway. i don't think anything is going to change, except there will be more toys to play with.
I agree, infact Lazy people, being lazy try to find ways to cut corners, and find smarter ways to get things done so they don't have to work as hard as others.
(a) Not long ago (10 yrs), I had to go to library to look up for technical papers. It used to be a pain to brush the dust in library to find your paper, xerox on the old photocopy machine. Often I would be coming out with thick stacks of bound journals. Thanks to good searching capabilities and online publications, I don't have to leave my desk and can access papers dating back to 1930s. Also with keyword search I can look at more papers in the same time. Just because someone forgot (may be intentionally) to reference some paper, I can still find it. Clearly I have saved lot of commute time. Also I can read the articles online and no need to print (save some trees).
(b) Second story is of my becoming more and more dumb because of calculators/computers. I never used calculators till highschool and could estimate things (atleast order of magnitude) easily. Recently I have been crunching numbers so often that I lost that practice. Fortunately I still try to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations before I fire the simulation. Simulations can give you any result you want (if you are not aware/careful).
I remember few years ago I did some simulations and showed it to my adviser. I was new and thought that tool can do anything. My adviser looked at the result and said: "Congratulations, you managed to do something phenomenal. You can quit your phd and can become a billionaire." In short, there are things which technology wouldn't teach. The fundamentals still need to be learnt before you can trust computers/technology.
Is technology evil ? No.
Intelligence is *not* remembering phone numbers. Intelligence is the application of ideas to solve problems. Having a strong memory can be helpful in some tasks (and certainly an amount of working store is a minimum requirement) but memorizing long chains of random data is pointless. Seeing patterns in *seemingly* random data, perhaps that requires a larger working store, but it also seems like a great place to apply computation.
I don't see the downside of the Internet, instant communication, computational power etc as far as intelligence goes. The example they give of a financial analysis: the modern analyst uses computers to build models and compute massive numbers of "what if" possibilities. The old analyst would be force to spend an immense amount of time and effort to compute one of these.
Likewise, I have on tap an immense number of resources on administrative tips and such. I could keep it all in my head, but why when I can search for solutions, bookmark them and document the least amount to be able to do it all again in the future?
Sig under construction since 1998.
I have long maintained that the mother of invention is not necessity, but in fact laziness.
Why do we have remote controls for our televisions and garage doors? We could very well get out of our chairs and cars, walk the 5 feet, and do it ourselves... but no, we have a machine to do it for us. I could drive down to the library and look up some information, but now I have the internet on a PC in my den to answer my inane questions.
I don't bother driving out sunday morning to buy a paper, or even getting one delivered. Too much work, when I already have the computer to serve it up. Or if I'm real lazy, I could get digital cable, where I just push the "Guide" on the remote control, and it tells me what's playing in the next X hours.
Are these really things we "need" (ala necessity) ? Perhaps, perhaps not. But they are all labor saving devices. I'd draw a conclusion here, but I think I'm just too lazy to finish.
That reminds me of two of the great virtues of a programmer. Laziness, and hubris. If your unix admin was missing either one of these he never would have created the current system you now enjoy.
AccountKiller
Quantifying intelligence is a fool's errand, at best. And over time, by god. Every generation believes the young folk are lazy idiots, and that civilization's going down the tubes.
And then you read example essay material from students today in universities and you think, "holy shit, they're right, these people are dumber than a sack of hammers".
But as far as I'm concerned, the *sum* is much higher today than ever before. More people are literate than ever before, more people have some basic math skills than ever before. More people get some basic schooling ( even if they don't want it, or use it ) than ever before.
Perhaps in the old days ( up until a couple centuries ago ) you might have had a situation where 95% of the population were illiterate in every way. No reading, no math, no geography. No knowledge except how to do their respective jobs. And the remaining 5% might have been, by our standards of thoroughness, quite well educated, with serious teachings in history, language, rhetoric, natural philosphy, etc.
Today education is better distributed, even if it means that we have some fairly dumb people coming out of our universities. The fact is, more people are getting an education, or at least the *means* for an education. If they should fail at it, it's their own damn fault, not society.
And the smart people today, by god, they're astonishing. Just pick up any book on some specialized field, say, physics, literature, GPU shader programming, biology, whatever. The work these people do blows my mind.
As far as I'm concerned, it's all A-O-K. At least the responsibility for success (or failure) lies progressively in our own hands. I'd say that's a step in the right direction.
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Although I don't have any evidence (not that is required on /.), my hypothesis for the Flynn effect has always been that language is in fact improving the human ability to abstract information better than it has done in the past and will continue this improvement over time.
;^)
The flimsy basis for this argument is that when babies are young and don't know any language, memory and intelligence seem very rudimentary, but as they learn language, they gain the ability to store, categorize, recall, and cross-link concepts and ideas to form intelligent behaviors. It stands to reason that it is quite possible that the more efficient the language, even if the symbolic processing capability is constant, the more apparently intelligent the resultant behaviors can be. Language (and the ability to process more complex information) is something that is constantly developing/evolving and can do so faster and independent of other forces like DNA evolution, possibly explaining how this effect has been going on in the past and also allowing for this effect to continue for the forseeable future.
One of the leaps of faith that has to be made to adopt this philosophy is that intelligent behavior is something that is the result of language (or more generically, symbolic processing), not any "magic" phenomena of the brain that requires evolution and genetics to change. This includes not only the behavior of test taking, but the more "real-world" behavior of surviving in an increasingly complex world.
As a cheap example, the invention of a language to express numbers has allowed humans to become more intelligent in mathematics than before that improvement has occured (e.g., "one" vs "many" vs a counting system). It allows us to organize our thought about math better and allows us to exhibit seemingly more intelligent behavior about math related things.
As a possibly future example, wouldn't it be great if we had a language to communicate musical queries better than "humming" to your friend to try to get them to remember the name of a tune? Seems to me that years from now when we look back we'll see how dumb we were that we had to use humming and grunts and groans to communicate and organize our thoughts about music. What morons we are
An analogous ideas is how "compression" has allowed a constant amount of digital bandwidth convey an increasing amount of information/per-unit-time, as improved compression techniques have evolved. Sometimes the improvement in compression has been low-level (oversampled uart vs binary manchester coding vs 8/10 coding vs PRML) medium level (MNP5, LZW) or high level (mpeg/jpeg video/picture compression). Even with a fixed capacity, the improvement in language has brought great increases in throughput (although improving throughput isn't the same as improving intelligence, it's still something to ponder).
This idea of evolution of language allowing improved representation of abstract ideas and resultant apparent increase in cognitive behavior has always intrigued me as I've pondered the difference between "chinese" ideographic style language vs "european" alphabetic style language. Is there any inherent advantage to either?
If there's a job that would take the same time either by brute force, or by writing a program that does the actual work quickly, I'd choose the latter. I'd probably choose it even if it took slightly longer than the grunt route, because of the fun and the experience/education gained. There's also this weird sense of inherent wrongness/evil in doing grunt work, if a clever alternative is available.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Whats really happening is:
.... well, how to make the user upgrade... then you have to leave stuff out and promise some of it next release as you figure out what then to take away...
... MS"...
The act of programming is inherently of incorporating the mindset of the programmers and then subjecting the users to it by forcing the users to have to think in the terms the programmer layed down in the users operation of the program.
Microsoft intentionally applies this fact and is why most users don't have a clue about the shell (and those who have used microsofts shell find it discouraging).
There are other places where the programming is not very intelligent but subject the users to its dumbness... Earthlink Webmail has been such a place, where not so long ago you had to individually select which mail you wanted to delete. But where 80% or better is spam and in the amount of at least 100 a day.
After communicating to them like a child, they finally put in a "select all" allowing you to then deselect the few you wanted to keep (the effects of that must have been enormus on the reduction of spam in general held on Earthlinks servers -- maybe thats where they got the additional 90 megs of email stirage space they now give me without my asking)
But the point is, when you have an industry that can only see as far forward as
Does this make users dumb?
Probably doesn't help the intelligence level of the users to improve, but intentionally "makes users need
Users aren't stupid, the software industry is and what choice does the users have but to be subjected to such bullshit?
Things don't have to be this way, but are currently, just as the Catholic Church promoted the Roman Numeral system of math, even when they were presented with a simpler and more powerful system of the Hindu-Arabic Decimal system.
No, it's because our knowledge builds on top of the last generation's knowledge, and along with writing those ideas down, humanity's knowledge base becomes exponentially larger.
Fair enough, but it seems to me that there is a difference between knowledge and intelligence. Knowledge is stuff we know, whereas intelligence is an aptitude to be able to apply it. Sure, the human race as a collective can now build devices that fly to space or build atomic bombs, but I can't. Not smart enough. Even if you laid all that knowledge out in front of me I'm not sure I could make it happen.
...ago, high-level math was reserved for the most badass smartass dudes in the world. But now... high school and college kids the world over learn the stuff that took great mathematitians decades to learn, in a couple of years. Having information readily and easily accessible helps us understand concepts far faster and far more effectively than the past would allow us to learn, and thus, I believe we become smarter as information is more easily accessible.
Are we also weaker, due to having cars and bicycles and levers and hydraulics and free delivery in 15 minutes or less?
... racist? Well, sure. Is that its primary use? Uh, no.
Well, probably. But good luck getting any number of people to give up their cars for the sake of exercise. So it's a moot point.
(Never mind the fact that I rode in a car to run a marathon -- something which, living in a small town, I would not have otherwise been able to do.)
Knowledge, like anything else, can be used in different ways. You can use it like the 300-pound guy who drives his SUV to McDonald's to get half a dozen Big Macs, or you can use it like the guy who rides his carbon fiber-frame bicycle up the Alps for fun.
You can use the internet to be lazy, but it was also possible to be lazy a hundred years ago. But you can also use the internet to do great things not possible a hundred years ago.
Come to think of it, you can rephrase the question with *any* word you don't like. Does the internet let you be
The article mentions On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins' book about intelligence. I read it this summer, and think it is a great book with a lot of insightful comments that will seem almost obvious after you finish the book. On Intelligence presents his theory of how the brain becomes intelligent and how that information can be applied to computers. Anyone interested in AI should look into it (although it's not exactly a light read).