Since the cognition revolution of over hundred and fifty years ago in the African Savannah, homos sapiens have been apogee of intelligent life on earth. Indeed the entire known universe. However, this is about to change. Modern technology has introduced a different kind of intelligence that not onl...
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Technology and the Future of Human Beings
Since the cognition revolution of over hundred and fifty years ago in the African Savannah,
homos sapiens have been apogee of intelligent life on earth. Indeed the entire known universe.
However, this is about to change. Modern technology has introduced a different kind of
intelligence that not only matches human intelligence but will soon surpass it. In so doing, this
technology is changing the nature of human intelligence and resetting the course of human
history moving into the future. Artificial intelligence is bound to replace most of human labor in
the job market while online tools and platforms like google change the way human beings think
and live. Online platforms like google, and artificial intelligence are not threats to human life yet,
however, an unsupervised rise of artificial intelligence puts the status of human life on earth at
great risk.
In his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, published on the Atlantic Daily (July/August
Issue, 2008), Nicholas Carr examines the ways in which the use of google and other online
sources of information is transforming how we think; perceive, digest, and translate information.
He begins by giving the anecdote of his own experience with reading online and those of his
close relations. “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or
something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the
memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing” (Carr 313). After years of
reading material online and being bombarded by billions of different versions the same
information at a time, he notes that his brain has been re-wired to read and digest information
differently than it did when the source of such information was books, magazines, and television.
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All these sources of information differ from google and online platforms in one way, they offer
information in a passive manner and focus on one piece of information at a time. Net on the
other hand provides the reader with an “immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of
information” at the same time (Carr 312). With this new way of passing information has come a
new way of thinking. Thus the article asserts that readers’ attention spans has been highly limited
and their minds now “expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly
moving stream of particles” (Carr 314).
Kevin Kelly, on the other hand, overlooks the way online and artificial intelligence are
changing the human brain and mind and argues for unavoidable replacement of human labor by
artificial intelligence and the benefits of it. In his article title Better than Human: Why Robots
Will – and Should – Take our Jobs, Kelly notes that artificial intelligence will replace human
labor in most fields sooner than most imagine. He argues that most people think this revolution
will be slower because they misunderstand the nature of artificial intelligence. “We have
preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what
is already happening around us” (Kelly 299). Most people expect artificially intelligent robots to
look like human beings, both physically and mentally. However, Robots like Baxter, “a
revolutionary new work-bot from Rethink Robotics”, have proved that this is not really
necessary. With this understanding, notes the author, the job of human beings now is to reconcile
our existence with that of machines. “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against
them, we lose. This is a race with the machines” (Kelly 301). For the jobs taken away by
machines, more will be created, almost in the same fashion the industrial revolution did.
Both articles present valid arguments for and against artificial intelligence. Carr takes an
individual view of this new form of intelligence. He examines closely how it will change
individual human beings: their thinking and how they perceive the world. A collection of
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