Google is there - no need for intelligence?

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Doctor of Philosophy, Leading Researcher, Institute of Physical and Mathematical Problems of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Today, many educators complain about the phenomenon of “clip thinking” in students, about the fact that they are unable or find it very physically difficult to read, much less master, large fragments of text, for example, an entire book, since most of their time working with sign systems is spent exchanging instant messages, commenting on and evaluating content on social networks.

This, as teachers claim, has a very negative effect on erudition and the ability to think logically. Many of them complain that "the student has become a complete cretin and moron", that they give up and are dj email database list afraid for the future of the Motherland and the entire human civilization.

This is how the author of the infamous article “Is Google Making Us Dumber?» Nicholas Carr describes the effect of intellectual decline on himself by analogy with how, in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the supercomputer HAL desperately complained to David Bowman about the fading of his mind as he switched off his memory cells one by one: "Dave, my mind is leaving me. I can feel it. I can feel it."

Nicholas Carr

Lately, I have had the uneasy feeling that someone or something is rummaging around in my brain, rearranging neural circuits and reprogramming my memory. My mind is still there, as far as I can tell, but it is changing. I don’t think the way I used to. This is especially noticeable when I read. I used to be able to immerse myself in a book or a long article with ease. My brain would get carried away by the narrative or argument, and I would wander for hours along long prose paths. This rarely happens anymore. After two or three pages, my attention begins to wander, I become restless, I lose the thread, and I start looking for something else to do. It feels like I have to constantly drag my unruly brain back to the text. Deep reading, which used to happen quite naturally, has become a struggle.

However, it would be wrong to think that the dullness that Carr describes is, on the one hand, a unique phenomenon of our time, and on the other hand, an exclusively negative effect of the decline in intellectual abilities. The fact is that those intellectual abilities that we are accustomed to perceive as proper signs of a good mind are the result of the demand for certain cognitive functions - a continuation of practical everyday household and professional activities. Meanwhile, in different historical eras, different cognitive abilities were the criterion of intelligence. Let us try to look at this process in historical perspective.

At first, a good mind was identified with a good memory. It was by this criterion that priests were selected. It is known that the most ancient sacred text of mankind is Rigveda, before being written down, was passed down from generation to generation orally. The priestly community was divided into related clans, each of which was assigned the task of passing down from generation to generation in memorized form a certain fragment of the Rigveda. The same fragment was memorized by different clans in case one clan died out or died out.