Aaron Durlauf

With the innovation of any new technology with the potential for vast social change, from the printing press to the television, comes the inevitable debate about whether the technology and the change are good. The inception of the “digital age” we find ourselves living in is no exception. There are however some key distinctions. As technological growth has expanded exponentially, the potential for new technologies has expanded at the same rate, and thus the impact they have on human society is far greater as well; so much so as to make the debate framed less around the usefulness or safety of 21^st Century technologies, but rather upon their effects on our essential humanity.

Nicholas Carr is a renowned columnist and vocal critic of the effects that the new technologies of the information age may have on humanity. In his article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? He contends that the vast availability of information, simply at the click of a button, has caused us to think less deeply and scavenge for information. He aptly uses the metaphor of us changing from scuba divers to jet skiers in the sea of information. Although he admits that the long term neurological studies to back him up don’t exist yet, Carr goes so far as to suggest that the way in which we process information may even be changing at the biological level.

At the beginning of his article Carr makes a point of acknowledging all potential benefits of the internet, yet he continues to decry the expansion of the digital world as changing what makes us essentially human. This brings up a good question, what does it mean to be human? Are our ancestors from ten thousand years ago any less human than we are today? True they may have had no written language, but nevertheless their DNA is essentially identical to ours. Will the people of the future, perhaps with nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and pharmaceutical advances, be any less human than we are now?

Jamais Cascio, another columnist for The Atlantic magazine, writes in her article Get Smarter of all the possibilities that technological advances may have for human society, including the expansion of information technologies, nanotech implants for humans, genetic engineering, and pharmaceutical improvements. Cascio characterizes these changes not as altering our society to be something that is no longer essentially human, but as ways of evolving human society. Cascio also makes another important point that this technology is in its infancy, we have not yet adapted to it, and it has not yet adapted to us. Additionally, she points out that change is inevitable, resisting it would be futile.