Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

"...The central point about the marvelous technologies that are emerging today is how exponentially more effective we can be if we augment our knowledge and skills with machines and their software. Thompson recalls how IBM's Big Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. That was great but even more significant was the victory of two class C chess players named Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen over grandmasters teams in a "free style" chess tournament in which players augmented their skills with the help of chess playing software. The reason the two amateurs were able to beat much stronger opponents who also used "chess engines" was their superior ability to combine human decision making with computer skills.

This is the future, folks: we will be cyborgs: man and machine working together. We may not have the machines physically attached or inside our bodies but we will be closely tethered to them in almost all aspects of life.

Again is this good or bad? Well it's good in the sense that we will be more effective at what we do. Whether we will be smarter is a moot question. Machines don't care. Software has no soul and yearns for nada. But we biological creatures do care about one thing or another and so we make the decisions. We pull the trigger so to speak.

So what's it all about, Alfie? Were we meant to drink from a fire hose of information while multitasking on various electronic gadgets? One thing I can tell you is that this book makes it clear to me that I don't really know what is going on. The world is moving so, so very fast that obsolescence is not only built into the products of the digital age, it is built into our ideas about what is real, what is true and what we should value. It really is a brave new world."