There were a number of delightful ironies related to that
panel. How did I get the opportunity to
be part of it? My name came up in a web
search by a producer, they sent me an e-mail, I pointed them to my February 18
blog post on the extended mind (“Where
is the mind, and why does its location matter?”), and that was that. In short, smart technology was responsible
for me talking about its effects!
After agreeing to appear on the panel, I decided that I
needed to prepare, and performed some additional web browsing and reading. This immediately led me to several
interesting sources, including Nicholas Carr’s famous article in The Atlantic
that asked if Google was making us stupid.
The producer helpfully e-mailed links to some additional material, which
also included Carr’s piece.
I do not agree with Carr’s argument (it is too anecdotal),
but it led me to a wonderful example of how this debate about the effects of
technology on intelligence is effectively 2400 years old. Carr cites Plato’s dialogue between Socrates
and Phaedrus as providing an argument about the negative effects of the written
word. I hunted down Plato’s Complete Works (1997, edited by John M.
Cooper, Hackett publishing) from my son’s extensive philosophy library. There I found the claim that writing “will
introduce forgetfulness into the soil of those who learned: they will not
practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which
is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to
remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a
potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the
appearance of wisdom, not with its reality” (pp. 551-552). Of course, we only know of Socrates’
teachings because Plato wrote. Carr
cites Plato, who wrote about Socrates 2400 years ago, and I extend my knowledge
a little further by doing some reading!
Of course, the World Wide Web and smart phones are only the latest tools
for extending the mind. To the probable
dismay of Socrates, the written word is a far more pervasive technology for
extending human cognition. Not long
after my television appearance, I finished reading a book on the history of
computer programming languages (Go To
by Steve Lohr, Basic Books, 2001). In a
chapter on the history of the GUI and the Mackintosh, Lohr cites some classic
work – completely unknown by me – by J.C.R. Licklider, who was a
Harvard-trained psychologist. While
working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Licklider published a paper that
presciently argued that the goal of computing was to augment intelligence, and
not to substitute for it.
I was intrigued by Lohr’s mention of this work, partly because Licklider
was a psychologist, and partly because I had been thinking more about the
extended mind after appearing on the Alberta Primetime panel. Naturally, I used a new technology (the World
Wide Web) to access an old tool (the written word) when I retrieved Licklider’s
1960 paper “Man-machine symbiosis”. This
paper is full of key ideas, and is particularly interesting to consider in
terms of developments in computer technology (and its use) 50 years after it
first appeared. To me, two key themes of
embodied cognitive science run throughout Licklider’s piece. First, his notion of a symbiotic relationship
between humans and computers is essentially one of emergence: the extended mind
created by this symbiosis is capable of solving different problems than either
component is on its own. Second,
Licklider in essence argued that the creation of this symbiosis required
advances in affordances: that is, computer technology had to develop in a
fashion that led to a seamless man-machine interface. “It seems likely that the contributions of
human operators and equipment will blend together so completely in many
operations that it will be difficult to separate them neatly in analysis” (Licklider,
1960, p. 6).
One theme that runs through Licklider’s article is that the human
contribution to man-computer symbiosis is to help guide the problem-solving
process, and to evaluate its results. To
me, this suggests that by offloading some cognitive tasks to modern technology,
we may be freeing our minds for making alternative contributions to extended
thought. Smart technology is not making
us stupid; it is making us use our minds in different ways to take advantage of
new affordances in the world.
Links:
-
Alberta Primetime panel discussion of smart technology, televised March 20, 2013
- Licklider, J. C. R. (1960). Man-computer symbiosis. IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE-1(1), 4-11.