Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  I went into AI to deal with exactly this issue. I was irritated that people would argue about what was true. They would get into fights about Babe Ruth’s lifetime batting average. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Someone can quickly find it. Argument over.

  At first glance, we might think the Internet has radically changed the way we look for and accept evidence. I’m sure this is true for the intellectuals who write Edge response essays. I’m able to find evidence more quickly, to find explanations that others have offered more easily. I can think about a complex issue with more information and with the help of others who have thought about that issue before. Of course, I could always do this in a university environment, but now I can do it while sitting at home, and I can do it more quickly. This is nice, but less important than people realize.

  Throughout human history, evidence to help thinking has been gathered by consulting others, typically the village elder, who might very well have gotten his knowledge by talking to a puff of smoke. Today people make decisions based on evidence they get from the Internet, all right, but that evidence often is no better than the evidence the village elder may have supplied. In fact, that evidence may have been posted by the modern-day version of the village elder.

  The intelligentsia may well be getting smarter because they have easy access to a wider range of good thinking, but the rest of the world may be getting dumber because they have easy access to nonsense. I don’t believe the Internet has changed the way I or anyone else thinks. It has changed the arbiters of truth, however. Now everyone is an expert.

  Pioneering Insights

  Neil Gershenfeld

  Physicist; director, MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; author, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication

  The Internet is many things: good and bad (and worse) business models, techno-libertarian governance and state censors, information and misinformation, empowerment and addiction. But at heart it is the machine with the most parts ever created. What I’ve learned from the Internet comes not from Web 2.0 or Anything Else 1.0; it’s the original insights from the pioneers that made the Internet’s spectacular growth possible.

  One is interoperability. While this sounds like technological motherhood and apple pie, it means that the Internet protocols are not the best choice for any particular purpose. They are, however, just good enough for most of them, and the result of sacrificing optimality has been a world of unplanned synergies.

  A second is scalability. The Internet protocols don’t contain performance numbers that impose assumptions about how they will be used, which has allowed their performance to be scaled over six orders of magnitude, far beyond anything initially anticipated. The only real exception to this was the address size, which is the one thing that has needed to be fixed.

  Third is the end-to-end principle: The functions of the Internet are defined by what’s connected to it, not by how it is constructed. New applications can be created without requiring anyone’s approval and can be implemented where information is created and consumed rather than centrally controlled.

  A fourth is open standards. The Internet’s standards were a way to create playing fields, not score goals; from VHS versus Betamax to HD-DVD versus Blu-ray, the only thing that has changed in standards wars is who’s sitting on which side of the table.

  These simple-sounding ideas matter more than ever, because the Internet is now needed more than ever—but in places it has never been. Three-quarters of electricity is used by building infrastructure, which wastes about a third of that, yet many of the attempts to make it intelligent hark back to the world of central office switches and dumb telephones. Some of the poorest people on the planet are “served” by some of the greediest telcos, whereas it is now possible to build communications infrastructure from the bottom up rather than the top down. In these and many more areas, four decades of Internet development are colliding with practices brought to us by (presumably) well-meaning but ill-informed engineers who don’t study history as part of an engineering education and thereby doom everyone else to repeat it. I’d argue that we already know the most important lessons of the Internet. What matters now is not finding them but making sure we don’t need to keep refinding them.

  Thinking in the Amazon

  Daniel L. Everett

  Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts; author, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

  During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent months at a time in the Brazilian Amazon, in complete isolation with the Pirahã people. My only connection with the wider world was a clunky Philips shortwave radio I bought in São Paulo. In the darkness of many Amazonian nights, I turned the volume low and listened, when all the Pirahãs and my family were asleep, to music shows such as Rock Salad, to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, and to news of such events as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan. As much as I enjoyed my radio, though, I wanted to do more than just listen passively. I wanted to talk. I would lie awake after discovering some difficult grammatical or cultural fact about the Pirahã and feel lost. I could barely wait to ask people questions about the data I was collecting and my ideas about it. I couldn’t, though—too isolated. So I put thoughts of collaboration and consultation out of my head. Now, this wasn’t a completely horrible outcome; isolation taught me to think independently. But there were times when I would have liked to have had a helping hand.

  All that changed in 1999. I bought a satellite phone with Internet capability. I could e-mail from the Amazon! Now I could read an article or a book in the Pirahã village and immediately contact the author. I learned that if you begin your e-mail with, “Hi, I am writing to you from the banks of the Maici River in the Amazon jungle,” you almost always get a response. I would send half-baked ideas around the world to colleagues and people I didn’t even know and get responses back quickly—sometimes while I was floating down the Maici in my boat, drinking a beer and relaxing from the demands of being the main entertainment for a village of practical-joking Pirahãs. After reading these responses, I would discard some of my ideas, develop others, and, most important, contemplate brand-new ones. I could not have telephoned my interlocutors; most were too busy to take random phone calls from conversation-hungry Amazonianists. And I didn’t know most of them all that well. Sending a regular letter was not possible from the Pirahã village. My thinking about language and culture were altered profoundly by access to fresh intellectual energy.

  In the city, where I now do most of my work, the Internet has become an extension of my memory—it combats the occasional senior moment, helping me to find names, facts, and places nearly instantly. It gives me a second, bigger brain. The Internet has allowed me to learn from people I’ve never met. It has placed me in a university that has profoundly affected my career, my research, and my worldview.

  I rarely connect to the Internet from the Amazon these days. I’m not there as long or as frequently as in the past. I’ve learned that the Internet is just a tool. It doesn’t fit every job. I avoid using it for tasks requiring a more personal connection, such as administering my university department or talking to my children. But if it’s just a tool, it’s a wondrous tool. It changed my thinking (and my approach to thinking), just as the first chain saw must have affected loggers. The Internet gave me access to as much information (for good or ill) as any researcher in the world, even from the rain forest.

  The Virtualization of the Universe

  David Gelernter

  Computer scientist, Yale University; chief scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; author, Judaism: A Way of Being

  The Internet is virtualizing the universe, which changes the way I act and think. Virtualization (a basic historical transition, like industrialization) means that I spend more and more of my time acting within—and thinking about the mirror reflection of—some external system or institution in the (smooth, pondlike) sur
face of the Internet. But the continuum of the cybersphere will emerge from today’s bumpy cob-Web when virtualization reaches the point at which the Internet develops its own emergent properties and systems—when we stop looking at the pixels (the many separate sites and services that make up the Web) and look at the picture. (It’s the picture, not the pixels! Eventually top-down thinking will replace bottom-up engineering in the software world—which will entail a roughly 99.9 percent turnover in the current population of technologists.)

  Conversation spaces, for example, will be simple emergent systems in the cybersphere, where I talk and listen (or read and write) in a space containing people with whom I like to converse, with no preliminary set-up (as long as there’s a computer nearby), as if I were in a room with friends. If I want someone’s attention, I say his name or look at him; if I speak a little louder, I’m seeking a general discussion. If I say “Let’s talk about Jasper Johns,” the appropriate group of people materializes. If one of them is busy, I can speak now and he can speak back to me later, and I can respond later still. Some people claim to be good at multitasking; we’ll see how many slow-motion conversations they can keep going simultaneously.

  Today there are many universities and courses online; eventually, as virtualization progresses, we’ll see many, or most, absorbed into a world university, where you can walk the halls, read the bulletin boards, and peek into classrooms within a unified space without caring which conventional university or Website contributed what. We’ll see new types of institutions and objects emerge, too. Virtual objects and institutions will absorb their own histories (like cloth absorbing the fragrance of flowers), so I can visit virtual Manhattan now or roll it backward in time; a large subset of all the knowledge that exists about, say, Wells Cathedral is absorbed into the virtual or emergent Wells Cathedral. At virtual Wells, I can dive deeper for detail about any aspect of the place or roll the building (and its associated ideas and institutions) backward in time until they vanish into the mists of history; or, for that matter, I can tentatively push virtual Wells forward in time (which is not so easy—like pushing something uphill) and see what can be calculated, forecast, or guessed about the cathedral’s future a day, a week, or a thousand years from now.

  Virtualization has the important intellectual side effect of leading us toward a better understanding of the relation between emergent properties and virtual machines or systems. Thus “I” am an emergent property of my body and mind; “I” (my subjective experience of the world and my self ) am a virtual machine, of sorts; but “I” (or “consciousness”) am just as real (despite being virtual) as the pull-down menu built of software—or the picture that emerges from the pixels. Like industrialization, virtualization is an intellectual as well as a technological and economic transition; like industrialization, it’s a change in the texture of time.

  Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder

  Rodney Brooks

  Panasonic Professor of Robotics, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab; author, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us

  When a companion heads to the bathroom during dinner, I surreptitiously pull out my iPhone to check my e-mail and for incoming SMS. When I am writing computer code, I have my e-mail inbox visible at the corner, so that I can see if new messages arrive—even though I know that most that do arrive will be junk that has escaped my spam filters. When I am writing a paper or letter or anything else serious, I flip back and forth, scanning my favorite news sites for new gems; on weekdays I check on stock prices—they might be different from what they were five minutes ago.

  I recently realized why I enjoy doing a mindless but timed Sudoku puzzle so much—the clock stops me from breaking off to go graze on the endless variety of intellectual stimulations the Web can bring to me. Tragically, Sudoku is my one refuge from information-provoked attention deficit disorder.

  The Internet is stealing our attention. It competes for it with everything else we do. A lot of what it offers is high-quality competition. But unfortunately, a lot of what it offers is merely good at capturing our attention and provides us with little of long-term import—sugar-filled carbonated sodas for our mind.

  We, or at least I, need tools that will provide us with the diet Internet, the version that gives us the intellectual caffeine that lets us achieve what we aspire to but doesn’t turn us into hyperactive intellectual junkies.

  Recently, as reported in Nature, an open group of people interested in mathematics (including some of the best currently active mathematicians in the world) used wikis and blogs to come up with a new and elegant proof of the Hales-Jewett theorem in thirty-seven days. The Internet provided a new forum for geographically disparate people to collaborate and contribute new insights, each small and incremental, enabling a result that at best might have taken the brightest of them many months or years to achieve individually.

  We can now find just about any scientific paper we want online; I’ve found some old ones of mine that I had no idea were digitized. I was a smart young thing once, I must say. Soon, just about everything ever written or recorded will be available in some form on the Internet, immediately.

  The two promises—ease of collaboration and instant access to any and all information—do indeed change the way we work. Just as Arabic numerals empowered our computation abilities, and just as mass-produced books empowered many more people to have a reference library, and just as the tape recorder and camera empowered us to record data better for careful analysis, and just as calculators and computers empowered us to simulate physical systems without a direct physical analog, the Internet has empowered us to do new and grander things more quickly than previously possible.

  But there are kinks yet to be worked out, besides the theft of our attention. There is stability of pointers (so that on our desktop machines our files may move around on the disk but the pointers to them will automagically update to the new location), there is stability of format (so that old movies or documents will still be readable), there is the issue of being able to aggregate digital media into manipulable containers (I used to use cardboard portfolio file cases to organize multiple media for each of my current projects), and then there is that pesky problem of business models, so that people will have a way of getting paid for things they do that we all use.

  We’re still in the middle of it. We operate in new ways, but those ways have not yet stabilized. Ultimately they will, at least for some of us. I’m hoping I will find my way into that group.

  Present Versus Future Self

  Brian Knutson

  Associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, Stanford University

  Like it or not, I have to admit that the Internet has changed both what and how I think.

  Consider the obvious yet still remarkable fact that I spend at least 50 percent of my waking hours on the Internet, compared to 0 percent of my time twenty-five years ago. In terms of what I think, almost all my information (e.g., news, background checks, product pricing and reviews, reference material, general “reality” testing, etc.) now comes from the Web. Given the ubiquity and availability of Web content, how could one resist its influence? Although this content probably gets watered down as a function of distance from the source, consensual validation might offset the degradation. Plus, the Internet makes it easier to poll the opinions of trusted experts. So, overall, the convenience and breadth of information on the Internet probably help more than hurt me.

  In terms of how I think, I fear that the Internet is less helpful. Although I can find information faster, that information is frequently tangential. More often than I’d like to admit, I sit down to do something and then get up bleary-eyed hours later, only to realize that my task remains undone (or I can’t even remember the starting point). The sensation is not unlike walking into a room, stopping, and asking yourself, “Now, what was I here for?”—except that you’ve just wandered through a mansion and can’t even remember what the entrance looked like.

/>   This frightening, face-sucking potential of the Web reminds me of conflicts between present and future selves first noted by ancient Greeks and Buddhists and poignantly elaborated by philosopher Derek Parfit. Counterintuitively, Parfit considers present and future selves as different people. By implication, with respect to the present self the future self deserves no more special treatment than anyone else does. Thus, if the present self doesn’t feel a connection with the future self, then why forgo present gratification for someone else’s future welfare?

  Even assuming that the present self does feel connected to the future self, the only way to sacrifice something good now (e.g., reading celebrity gossip) for something better later (e.g., finishing that term paper) is to slow down enough to appreciate that connection, consider the conflict between present and future rewards, and decide in favor of the best overall course of action. The very speed of the Internet and convenience of Web content accelerate information search to a rate that crowds out reflection, which may bias me toward gratifying the salient but fleeting desires of my present self. Small biases, repeated over time, can have large consequences. For instance, those who report feeling less connected to their future self also have less money in their bank accounts.