I was reading an article today from the magazine, The Atlantic, a magazine I would recommend by the way, and I came across an article entitled “Is Google making us Stoopid?” (All quotes are from The Atlantic unless otherwise noted) I figured the article would be about how we have information overload today, and we don’t really have to exercise our minds anymore to find useful information. Turned out I was right, but the article did have a few twists that got me thinking. It talked about how in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter which allowed him to continue to write in light of his failing eyesight. However, a good friend noticed that when Nietzsche started using the typewriter his writing style changed. He “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.” It’s pretty fascinating how external forces can begin to slowly change our internal forces. Fast forward 125 years and a little company called Google has changed the way we think and operate today. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page, a founder of Google, said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” That’s insane to think about. Would we really be better off with an AI smarter than our noodle?
What really got me thinking about this topic is that this past Sunday, during a Sunday worship service, I started reading Romans ch.12. I realize I should have been listening to the sermon, but the reading was more interesting. Anyway, I bet I’ve read this chapter in Romans 50 times over my lifetime, but I happened to be reading from The Message translation this time. And as so often is the case when I read the Message a phrase really struck me, “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.” I’m afraid I’m guilty of this all too often. The systems I live in definitely affect my life. How I pay bills, read articles, and communicate with people has changed because of these systems, but I hope I don’t become so well adjusted to my culture that I stop thinking. I hope I can sit and dwell on the deep and mysterious mystery that is God. I hope I don’t allow AI’s to do my thinking for me, or any external force for that matter. I hope I will continue to stretch and work out my mind by reading long books, writing short blogs, and reflecting on it all. The magazine article ended by looking back in history even further. It seemed that Socrates was worried that writing could be a bad thing for society. He thought as people began to write and rely on a written forum, they would, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” Crazy huh?! Good thing that writing thing took off or we probably wouldn't know Socrates said that. But maybe Socrates was right. More times than not I feel like the pancake man! Very wide and far reaching, but really quite shallow. Shallow in life, and worse shallow in my faith. Maybe it’s because of my surroundings and environment, or maybe it’s just because I’m lazy and it’s too much work to really stop and think. Maybe there's some other pancake people out there? Man, all this pancake talk has made me hungry, maybe I’ll go nuke a pancake…Thank goodness for new technology!
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