2005-07-29

We Are the Web

Jack pointed this to me, certainly to temper the mood in my previous post. Not sure we wanted that, but certainly it's happening.
What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

1 comment:

  1. Google is just great for those people who want to ask the same questions as everyone else, and get the same answers. In a Google-dominated world, Google rankings depend on the clicks of previous websurfers, and this dependency will become increasingly sophisticated. Google therefore supports, with ever-greater efficiency and effectiveness, an intellectual activity characterized by A.A. Milne (author of Winnie-The-Pooh) as "Thinking
    with the Majority
    ".

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