Nicholas Carr Reviews Tim Berners-Lee’s Memoir
“Not all technologies improve people’s lives. Just as Berners-Lee’s now omnipresent web shapes industries and markets, it shapes its users’ thoughts, perceptions, and relationships. As we’re slowly coming to understand, human beings did not evolve to be virtual creatures in a computer-generated world. The internet operates at a scale and speed that conflict with the […]
A History Of Promises That Tech Will Revolutionize Learning
Nicholas Carr: AI Erases Human Voice
On Eliza, The Original Chatbot, And Its Creator’s Reflections On AI
“What makes us most human, Weizenbaum had come to believe, is what is least computable about us—the connections between our mind and our body, the experiences that shape our memory and our thinking, our capacity for emotion and empathy. The great danger we face as we become more intimately involved with our computers—as we come […]
Nicholas Carr On AI In Learning
“Shirky senses a growing “sadness” among students as they become more dependent on AI. They feel compelled to use the technology even though they know it’s sapping their learning — and foreclosing the intellectual possibilities that learning opens, the satisfactions that come with doing or grasping something hard.”
“Epistemological Slop” – Nicholas Carr On AI Search Engines
Nicholas Carr On Computers Becoming What We Make Them To Be
“If the new machine can be said to have a soul, it’s the one Turing feared: the small, callow soul of its creators.”
Nicholas Carr: “Truth Doesn’t Scale”
“Fact checking works, if imperfectly, in traditional publishing because it’s conducted by a small set of people who share similar values and goals. They may have different views about any number of matters, but they hold a common belief in the standards of journalism, a belief that the accuracy of information is a public good… […]
Nicholas Carr On Smartphones Via Marshall McLuhan
“Out Of The Landscape, Into The Portrait”
“Thanks to the lateral placement of our two eyes in our head, we see the world in something like Cinemascope. Our horizontal field of vision spans about 180 degrees, while our vertical field is limited to about 130 degrees. The horizontal bias makes sense in evolutionary terms… Now imagine being forced to wear blinders and […]