Nicholas G. Carr

So I'm very concerned, and I am a victim of this, of the way that the Internet is changing our brains, not only with respect to scrupulosity.

Many years ago I read a book by a journalist named, I think it was Nicholas Carr.

The title of the book was The Internet is Changing Our Brains.

And I'm persuaded that it is, you know.

The soul will push back, and it'll push back in lots of ways.

But I was just reading Nicholas Carr's book.

He almost won the Pulitzer Prize for this, called The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

And his whole point in that is the amount of social media and internet life that the average person consumes is literally changing the structure of our brains.

Yeah.

Nicholas Carr was the one, the first person that I read who used the category of intellectual technologies and an intellectual technology is different than a technology like the screwdriver or a drill because the intellectual technology is intimately connected with language.

So I can use a screwdriver, I can use a drill, I can use a shovel, I can use a combustion engine.

And that technology does have a world-shaping effect on what we expect from life, certainly.

Well, so I'll give you kind of like the psychological answer, but I think there's also a spiritual answer to it.

The psychological answer is that there is an enormous amount of research that confirms that hypertext and digitally generated text does not sink into our memory as well as text in a print format.

And Nicholas Carr's book has a lot of this kind of research.

Another book I would commend to your audience, it's a little dated but still helpful, is called The Revenge of Analog by David Sachs, and where he talks about print books and other type of physical media industries and why they are more resilient than a lot of technologists assume that they're going to be.

That's more about power.

The Nicholas Carr book is

phenomenal.

I don't know that one, so give me that one.

The Big Switch.

Okay.

Nicholas Carr.

It's maybe 20 years old now.

Which brings us to the core of our analysis.

We are synthesizing a vast body of intelligence, heavily grounded in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, alongside rigorous neurobiological studies.

Our objective with this strategic synthesis is to determine precisely what intellectual capacities you trade away with every digital interaction and, crucially, what functional advantages you might acquire in return.

Because to understand the strategic implications for your own career development, we must first establish how the brain is capable of altering its physical structure.

But that linear mind is currently undergoing rapid dismantlement.

Our synthesis indicates the internet represents an unprecedented intellectual technology.

Nicholas Carr defines it as the universal medium.

It does not simply exist alongside previous technologies, it absorbs them.

While the long-term effects of this behavior are not known, There is plenty of evidence to suggest it is impairing our cognitive abilities.

In his Pulitzer Prize nominated book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr wrote, What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization.

We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

Over a century before the technological revolution, Nietzsche, with impressive foresight, pinpointed the ill effects smartphones would have on our capacity to reflect and cultivate self-knowledge.

Well, and it, it, it's so difficult in a world where these things are constantly thrust at you.

Um, I, I remember years ago, Nicholas Carr, Carr, uh, wrote, um, in The Atlantic Monthly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" This was, uh, probably 15-plus years ago, and he's bemoaning many of the same things you're talking about-

Yeah

... where he used to have just a natural disposition where he could sit down and read a long-form book and just now finds himself with his mind wandering and disconnecting from it.

That's actually his primary category.

And then flip forward to, let's say, one of the first critics of the techplex, you know, Nicholas Carr, who wrote some book-

Mm-hmm

...

Right.

I'm going to be discussing Nicholas Carr's Super Bloom in segment three, but something he writes about fits and ans- kinda answers this question.

He writes about William Butler Yeats' marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lee, and that was a muse that would go on to inspire much of his later poetry.

Hyde-Lee was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Oh, yeah.

And the mystically inclined Yeats loved this.

He actually transcribed and published 4,000 pages of her, her occult gibberish, and so he uses this as an analogy, and Nicholas Carr writes-

"One way to think about artificially intelligent text generation systems is as clairvoyance.