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The Outsourced Brain
A friend just forwarded to me an article called “The Outsourced Brain” over at the New York Times. A sample:
” Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Musical taste? I have externalized it. Now I just log on to iTunes and it tells me what I like.”
This is going to gradually become a debate over the next few years as we pass more and more of our thinking and life over to algorithms. Stroustrup once said “Software runs civilisation”. I think we’re approaching the point where we can say “Software runs civilians”. There are obviously issues with this that need to be explored.
About a year ago I developed a hypothesis of what humanity would broadly look like 100 years from now. Some friends found my synopsis of this vision a little ridiculous: “You know the borg in Star Trek? That’ll be us”.
What I mean is that we are slowly moving our thinking out into the cloud and acting as one. Individualism is being lost, group-think is being encouraged. If that sounds a little Orwellian, can I just point out that we’re the ones encouraging it on ourselves – from CCTV cameras to collaborative filtering on Amazon – it is not being imposed on us.
The irony is that for all the menace of Borg assimilation and Orwellian dystopia in fiction, we are shaping parts of our society into something that mimics it in the hope it will lead to peace and harmony within society. Maybe it will, I don’t know.
The hope we have is that if we spend less time thinking about what music to buy, which directions to use to get somewhere, and trying to remember things we can get out of Google and Wikipedia anyway, we’ll have time for more important things. The question is what things are we doing with that time? Are we just filling that brain capacity with other trivia we don’t need?
Not for the first time, I feel that those of us styled “Software Engineers” have a responsibility to ask some questions here.
