Is Google Making Us Stupid?

   It is hard to imagine what life would be like without the Internet. What if you had to write a paper and the instructions were you can not use the Internet? We rely on the web to make reading easy for us. We read an abstract, or an introduction to an article to see if it will be useful. This causes us to skim articles and not read them. When we skim an article we do not concentrate, we just get the gist of what the article is saying and move onto the next link. With all these link it makes reading on the Internet harder to focus. When you read something online it is hard to concentrate because while you are reading, you see an ad. pop up of your favorite store having a sale. We give into our impulses and click on the link, and five minutes later we cannot remember what we have read.

   Search engines like Google want to make searching for answers so easy that they pull hundreds of thousands of links to give us the answer we are looking for. Because we are able to find the answers quickly and efficiently, we do not have to interpret the message of the article. The message is just handed to us. We have programmed our brains to think this is how we read and gather information, the same way we program our brains to speak a language. It is more exciting to type something versus writing it, and it is the same way when looking up information. No one wants to sit for hours and read books, when they can type their question in a search engine and have the answer in seconds. We have programed our brains to work and think like computers, fast and efficiently. The scary part is, is that no one knows how the Internet is re-programming us. 

   With the Internet re-programing us, Google now wants to create an artificial intelligence. This artificial intelligence is being described as a brain outside of your body that knows everything. We will never have to remember anything, we will just know everything. If Google does pull this off we will never have to read anything ever again. This will take away our ability to develop our own thoughts, because we will have our "thoughts" right there. This will not leave room for any interpretation, everything will just black or white. There will be no room for conversation about different opinions.