What's making us stupid now?

Nicholas Carr writing for The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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.

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

In my opinion, the most notable thing about this article is the publication date: 2008.

I almost made this one of those posts I like to do where I swap out one word in a quote from many years ago to make it sound like it's commenting on the modern day, but I just gave it to you straight this time.

But 2008! That is somehow 18 years ago and was before almost anyone had a smartphone in their pocket. The world the author is reacting to is one in which you had a flip phone, you maybe had a GPS in your car, and you had only had Wi-Fi at home for maybe a couple years. And yet, the author is making the exact same points we find ourselves discussing today around AI.

This isn't to say that his concerns in 2008 were wrong, nor that the same concerns are wrong today when raised about things like ChatGPT. I bring this up largely to illustrate some context. In 2026, people will blast ChatGPT for destroying thinking and argue that services like Wikipedia and old school Google are what we should be using to properly think and properly know things. Yet, if you go back to when those technologies were new, people often talked about Wikipedia and Google the same way we talk about ChatGPT.