Is smart technology making us dumb?

We use search engines, like Google, every day.  Increasingly, when we start typing our search, Google even prompts us with alternatives as if it knows what we want to search for; like in the image below:

If a human did that to us, we would most likely yell at the person for interrupting our thought.  "Let me speak first" we would complain.  A fight could even ensue.  With Google, we are happy that it completes the thought for us?  Is Google thinking ahead for us good or bad?

I have always conveyed to students what I consider to be the most important function of education, which I recently did--yet again--in one of my classes:

 an important part of education is to know how to ask questions and to then knowing how to answer them.  This is important not merely because that's the way to earn a good letter-grade.  Nope, there is way more to that.  Throughout life, as we become more and more in-charge of our lives (and that autonomy rapidly increases with the proliferating digital technologies) the ability to think through, ask the right questions, and to then figure out the answers will be a prized attribute--in professional and personal lives.

To be able to ask the right question.  In work places, we have been at meetings where we have wondered, mostly within, "what is your point?"  At public forums, or even in C-Span if you watch those shows with the call-in features, it is quite common for the moderator to interrupt with "what's your question?"

I worry that because we have the likes of Google so easily available, we do not intentionally, purposefully, cultivate how to ask questions.  This is one of the many points that was brought up at the recent Intelligence Squared debates, which was on, well, the title of this post: Is smart technology making us dumb?  One of the debaters, Andrew Keen, argues:

 Nick was just saying that while the problems with Google or our search-centric culture is people are increasingly lazy . And what they're really lazy about is asking questions . What we're having is the automation of the act of asking a question . And that is one of the consequences or casualties of this digital revolution . And, of course, Socrates' greatest -- one of his greatest contributions to our culture was in the art of asking the question . That was the whole point of his philosophy, was it was about asking questions.
That's what knowledge was, asking questions . And as Nick has made it clear, we have forgotten, or we are forgetting how to ask questions, and that's extremely troubling.

To me "extremely troubling" is an understatement.

But then I ask myself whether it has always been the case that most humans couldn't be bothered about asking questions.  Most humans didn't care that they didn't know how to ask questions.  Thus, for instance, the frustration that Socrates had with Athenians who couldn't think.  Not knowing how to ask meaningful questions, and the apathy about that, are perhaps not new at all?  For the most part, humans have only been sheep and glad to follow whatever the shepherd said, be it out of ignorance or out of whatever divine the inspiration was?

Nicholas Carr was also a debater at that Intelligence Squared event--the "Nick" than Keen referred to.  Like most people, I came to know about Carr almost a decade ago, thanks to his lengthy essay in the Atlantic on whether Google is making us stupid.  In an interview with the BBC, Carr observes about automation:

the question isn't, “should we automate these sophisticated tasks?”, it’s “how should we use automation, how should we use the computer to complement human expertise, to offset the weaknesses and flaws in human thinking and behaviour, and also to ensure that we get the most out of our expertise by pushing ourselves to ever higher levels?”
We don’t want to become so dependent on software that we turn ourselves into watchers of computer monitors and fillers-out of checklists. Computers can play a very important role, here, because we are flawed; we do fall victim to biases or we overlook important information. But the danger is that you jump from that to saying, just let the computer do everything, which I think is the wrong course.

So, where are we headed?

I hope that, as individuals and as a society, we maintain a certain awareness of what is going on, and a certain curiosity about it, so that we can make decisions that are in our best long-term interest rather than always defaulting to convenience and speed and precision and efficiency.
I believe we should ask of our computers that they enrich our experience of life; that they open up new opportunities to us instead of turning us into passive watchers of screens. And in the end I do think that our latest technologies, if we demand more of them, can do what technologies and tools have done through human history, which is to make the world a more interesting place for us, and to make us better people. Ultimately, that is something that is up to us.

Yep. Whether smart technology is making us dumb, or better humans, is up to us. Each and every one of us. All of us.

Asking hard questions is a way to lose friends. So, ask those questions anyway

With every passing day, I am acutely aware of the very little time that I have left.  No, I am not referring to the death that looms large but to the end of summer and the beginning of a new academic year.  This is when I begin to offer myself deals and negotiate with myself; such as:

"If you at least think about the topics for one class, then you can take a coffee break"
"You can play bridge for thirty minutes if you at least log into the course management system" ...

Turns out that I offer myself lousy deals, and that I am also a horrible negotiator.  Thus, this Panjandrum is unable to break the impasse.

But, it is not that I am always taking coffee breaks (yes, I am) or that I am forever playing bridge (yes, I am.)  My mind is always thinking about classes and the topics and how I might be able to better engage with students.  This constant thinking, even if subconscious, then attracts me to reading articles that are not explicitly about any of the courses that I teach, but contribute a lot to my pedantic pontificating.

One of those articles is about the questions we share, and how to go about engaging with the big and hard questions:

A big part of the problem with public discourse, contends Feigelson, is that we often begin by asking hard questions before we have explored big questions. A “hard question,” he says, is one that requires special knowledge to answer — so only some people feel they can answer it — and it bears fruit only if the participants in the discussion already share a degree of trust or rapport.
A “big question,” by contrast, is one that matters to everyone and that everyone can answer. Big questions have the potential to tap people’s sense of curiosity and to draw out wisdom from the heart.

By now, like my students, perhaps you have already drifted off and are thinking about a coffee break.  I don't blame you.  Am able to type this only because I had a tall mug of coffee before I started blogging this piece.  Tell you what, here is a deal for you: you take that coffee break, and then return to reading this.  Sounds good?

Ah, you are back. Good.

So, hard questions versus big questions.  Examples of big questions, please?

Examples include: For whom are we responsible? What do we choose to ignore? Where do you feel at home? How does technology change us? When do you conform? When do you take a stand?

Hey, this is what most of my pedantic pontificating is all about. I often remind students that the courses I teach, and the courses they take from others, will help them articulate their own answers to some of the big questions of the day.  It is about them, their own selves, I tell students.

So, examples of hard questions then?

“If you start a student discussion with a hard question, like ‘How can we bring peace to the Middle East?,’” Feigelson says, “the two students who think they know the most are going to debate and protest, while everyone else watches and thinks they have nothing to contribute. It doesn’t build trust or capacity for solving problems."

Aha!

a big question can open a space in which each individual can contribute, speaking from experience, without feeling pressured to win a debate or demonstrate loyalty to a position. Big questions can help build the trust that’s necessary to grapple effectively with hard questions. For instance, one way to build toward a discussion of campus sexual assault is to frame a conversation around the question: “When have you been a witness?”
“When we start with a big question, we’re building empathy among the students,” says Sheila Katz, vice president for social entrepreneurship at Hillel International, who was the director of Ask Big Questions for four years. “The hope is that the students will look at the world differently, in a way that allows them to receive each person as they are, and engage in conversation, instead of just argument, debate or even violence.”

Exactly!  That empathy will certainly make students view the world very differently and begin to have a lot more realistic conversation with others on issues.  And, boy do we have issues all around--those hard questions.

So, how do we then begin to have those conversations?  Certainly not the television-style of yelling matches.

There is, of course, no right way to structure a conversation. But some principles are elaborated in the group’s conversation guides (which have been downloaded 9,000 times).

Sounds good, except this parenthetical note on downloaded 9,000 times.  Seriously?  They think a count of 9,000 downloads is newsworthy?  Why include that in the reporting?  Oh, wait, is that a hard question to ask?

We live in a world where we need to engage in critical conversations if we really want to make this a better place.  The hard questions of climate change and Middle East and Ebola and malnourishment and ... require us to have sincere, reasoned, conversations in which we listen to each other.   Instead, we are increasingly tending to avoid discussing those hard questions.

In the LA Times, this op-ed notes how social media seem to even end friendships when one begins to go after a "hard question" on Israel and Gaza:

I noticed my friend had written "OMG!!" under my post. And then she was gone.
With a couple of cool, obliterating keystrokes and no questions asked (or at least posted), she'd apparently banished me from her online world. Years of friendship ended with a wordless, virtual severing.
That's the way things work in social media.

The television-style yelling and cutting one off has now become a part of our virtual world, too, apparently.

Perhaps it's time to accept that Facebook is a lousy medium for political debate. People seem to be much more interested in making statements rather than asking questions or seeking out diverse opinions. As much as we might like to think we enjoy pluralistic feeds with multiple views, our "friends" tend to be those with whom we agree. The rest, we shed. A recent study from the University of Colorado Denver found that "polarizing posts" are one of the most frequently cited reasons for unfriending someone on Facebook.

Time for a coffee break and thirty minutes of bridge!