Copy Paste

Just to take forward the observations from the Hiding behind the Internet – it would like to illustrate, in greater detail, the “Something about Everything and Nothing in Particular” behaviour.

One would expect that while searching for information, the user would actually make a folder on his computer where he would be saving all the information that is downloaded. Upon having downloaded all the information that is needed – one would actually proceed to go through all of this downloaded information, for to be able to take out the more relevant bits, and more importantly build his own argument or on top of this downloaded information.

However, this group of people actually skip the intermediate step, and there is no folder that is made – no documents that are actually downloaded. There is just one final output document. The documents thrown up by the search results are only ‘viewed’ online and the more relevant bits are copied into the final output document in ‘real time’. It is not difficult to guess the extent of thinking – beyond copying and pasting - that is going on while all this is happening.

Alarming!

It reminds me of the John Serale’s Chinese Room experiment that proved how machine intelligence (AI) is inferior to the human intelligence because it does not really know what is the meaning of that what it is doing. For example a calculator can do great arithmetic but it does not know anything about mathematics. Deep Blue can beat Kasparov at a game of Chess – but it does not know anything about Chess or even the fact that it has actually won! (Does it need to? Well, that is another topic which needs a separate context for to be discussed.)

I do not mean to glorify human intelligence here – because the pace at which machine intelligence is evolving – we might be trumped soon. However I am alarmed and saddened by the prospect that a lot of people among us are becoming more and more like their machines. Inputting and outputting without conscious thinking about what their point of view is; what do they believe in; what they are actually doing; are they learning anything? How come they gave up the option to think so easily?

No wonder, many a times when these people are confronted with questions like “so what did you do today?” or “what are you doing now?”, or “what did you learn today?” they usually draw a blank. To be this is mainly because they are doing a lot but ‘nothing is really registering’! Surprising but true.

Comments

[Nitya]

very true.
the prob arises whn pple do more (of what they been doing earlier), n thinking less (than what they did earlier)... in many ways the internet encourages more n more of 'mind-less doing' till the point you become a robotic doer! scary...

[Saurabh Sharma]

Thanks for reading. I have been trying to look at this thought the other way. How would I be defending technology were i asked to. I would say "Internet is a tool, and like any other tool, it is as good as the hands it finds itself in."