Response to "Get Smarter"

Jamais Cascio's essay, "Get Smarter", praises technology and how it will increase and has already increased the capacity of knowledge for humans. This is in sharp contrast to Nicholas Carr's essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?". Both essays are informative about how technology, especially the internet, will change the way humans think but they do it in opposite ways.

Carr claims that internet takes away our ability to think properly or correctly. The common person no longer has to search for days, through books, to find the answers he is looking for but can just go on to the internet and find answers within a few minutes. Carr seems to think this a bad thing because it is taking away from man's ability to think for longs periods of time. The average person does not want to sit down and read a long book but wants to browse through short articles on the internet. Carr fails to realize that this is just another step in the evolution of human thinking. With the advent of books, man no longer had to remember every story or piece of history but could find it if necessary, and now with the internet, knowledge is always at our fingertips.

Cascio seems to understand the benefits  of the internet increasing our intelligence, not taking away from it. With things like Google man has access to more information, at any given time, than was ever possible in history. How could that be bad? Certain recent developments, such as drugs like modafinil, can increase one's ability to think and retain knowledge. This will in turn lead to better technology, which will then increase our knowledge even more and that cycle will repeat. This cycle of technology will continually make mankind more intelligent. The internet or Google are not making people more stupid but are actually going to make people more intelligent.