I think this is a reasonable concern, but it seems a little reminiscent of the way that people back in Ancient Greece worried that reading and writing would stop people’s memories working. Here’s Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, pretending to be an ancient Egyptian responding to Thoth’s invention of writing:
And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Maybe that did happen, in some sense—people in purely oral cultures are allegedly very good at remembering long things verbatim—but given how human civilization has progressed since the invention of writing, it seems unlikely that it was a bad thing for the overall cognitive capacities of the human race. If the internet is doing something similar, it might likewise turn out fine on balance.
(Epistemic status of this paragraph: baseless handwavy speculation.) If you don’t use a muscle, it shrinks and there’s no tendency for other muscles to get stronger to replace it. I’m not sure that’s quite how it works with the brain; I think less-used bits of brain get used for other things. So it could be the case (1) that having the internet always available makes us less good at remembering the sort of thing one can find on the internet but (2) that this in turn lets other things recruit the bits of brain we’d have used for that, leaving us—at least when the internet is at our fingertips—more capable mentally, not less. Of course there are lots of caveats. I don’t know how effectively one mental faculty can substitute for another in brain usage. Even if this effect is real, the cost in fragility (what if a big nuclear war wipes out the internet? what if you get convicted of some cybercrime and are told you’re not allowed network access for the next 10 years? what if an injury of some sort makes internet use suddenly much harder or less effective for you?) might outweigh it. It could be that some valuable mental abilities depend on having things in our heads rather than outside and that we’re lazily crippling those. Etc.
Both your and aaronb50′s counterpoints seem reasonable. I think it’s obvious that google makes us more knoweledgeable overall. But I also have a general tendency to believe that the first generation to adopt a new technology are the most prone to fall into all sorts of excesses and traps, before the next generation manages to learn from their parent’s failures. So my go-to with a new technology is “a cautious emthusiasm”. As you suggest in your 3 examples, I think there can be something as “too reliant on google”.
I think this is a reasonable concern, but it seems a little reminiscent of the way that people back in Ancient Greece worried that reading and writing would stop people’s memories working. Here’s Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus, pretending to be an ancient Egyptian responding to Thoth’s invention of writing:
Maybe that did happen, in some sense—people in purely oral cultures are allegedly very good at remembering long things verbatim—but given how human civilization has progressed since the invention of writing, it seems unlikely that it was a bad thing for the overall cognitive capacities of the human race. If the internet is doing something similar, it might likewise turn out fine on balance.
(Epistemic status of this paragraph: baseless handwavy speculation.) If you don’t use a muscle, it shrinks and there’s no tendency for other muscles to get stronger to replace it. I’m not sure that’s quite how it works with the brain; I think less-used bits of brain get used for other things. So it could be the case (1) that having the internet always available makes us less good at remembering the sort of thing one can find on the internet but (2) that this in turn lets other things recruit the bits of brain we’d have used for that, leaving us—at least when the internet is at our fingertips—more capable mentally, not less. Of course there are lots of caveats. I don’t know how effectively one mental faculty can substitute for another in brain usage. Even if this effect is real, the cost in fragility (what if a big nuclear war wipes out the internet? what if you get convicted of some cybercrime and are told you’re not allowed network access for the next 10 years? what if an injury of some sort makes internet use suddenly much harder or less effective for you?) might outweigh it. It could be that some valuable mental abilities depend on having things in our heads rather than outside and that we’re lazily crippling those. Etc.
Both your and aaronb50′s counterpoints seem reasonable. I think it’s obvious that google makes us more knoweledgeable overall. But I also have a general tendency to believe that the first generation to adopt a new technology are the most prone to fall into all sorts of excesses and traps, before the next generation manages to learn from their parent’s failures. So my go-to with a new technology is “a cautious emthusiasm”. As you suggest in your 3 examples, I think there can be something as “too reliant on google”.