| Title | Information Technology: Blessing or Trouble for Mankind? | |
| Date | Wednesday November 26 2014, @07:15AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the how-many-phone-numbers-do-you-remember,-now? dept. | ||
Jane, you ignorant slut.
- Dan Ackroyd, Weekend Update "Point/Counterpoint" on Saturday Night Live
The journalist and author Nicholas Carr has turned pessimistic on technology, and artificial intelligence in particular. This time, it isn't so much that IT doesn't matter, which is what he concluded over a decade ago. In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, in which Carr continues to explore themes covered in his most recent books, he argues that mankind has begun to delegate to machines more and more activities that once required thought, judgement, and practice. Carr acknowledges this isn't a new phenomenon — the erosion of craftsmanship occurred throughout the Industrial Revolution. But the trend has been accelerated by computers, both overt and embedded, which has led to atrophying of expert skills in such diverse professions as airline pilots, physicians, and building architects. Skilled professionals need to practice every day to maintain their edge, and the computers are taking that practice away from them and us, Carr says.
The Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan sounds a more positive note about information technology. O'Hagan dismisses the idea that ours is a world where we have hundreds of "friends", but nobody to talk to. Back in the late '70s and '80s, when he was first making his way into the adult world, life was no more soulful or intimate than it is today, says O'Hagan; the main difference was the amount of tedious legwork and days of waiting that is completely unnecessary in today's world where information, music, literature, shopping, and booking of services can be found or accomplished with a few clicks of a mouse and keypad. By analogy, O'Hagan says his mother was perfectly happy to use the invention of the refrigerator to avoid having to negotiate bottles with the milkman each morning; she didn't regret the "loss" of the clunkier way of doing things.
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