Who Among Us Can Read a Sextant?
Some old-school skills disappear, but tech isn't just dumbing people down. We're also learning new things.
Old school.
Photographer: William Vanderson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
A decade after an Atlantic magazine cover asked whether Google was making us stoopid, an MIT professor is proposing that our information technology is producing “Superminds.” Is it possible for our minds to become super and stupid at the same time? Are some forces dumbing down society while others advance collective knowledge?
In fact, the same force of technological progress may be accelerating society’s collective knowledge and at the same time allowing individuals to forget how to do things that used to be considered essential. That message comes out in rereading Nicholas Carr’s pessimistic 2008 Atlantic piece, and in the optimistic new book "Superminds": The surprising power of people and computers thinking together.