On Topic: Remind me again

You've heard my theory before, right, about how Spell-checker spells the doom of current civilization and has made us all just a little bit dumber?

It goes like this: Because many of us depend on some software to fix our spelling, we don't think we need to know as much. We've become lazy in exercising our brains, and this does not always go well.

Here's a real-life example. Once upon a time we used maps, fold-up sheets of paper, but now we ask our phones.

A couple weeks ago I was driving over to Cedar Rapids's southeast side to help a co-worker move. I had a general sense where I was going, but I pulled out my phone as I got closer.

I gave it the address on Bever Avenue. After it moment, it responded with cheery directions to Beaver Street in, I believe, St. Anne, Ill.

No, I said, Bever Avenue SE, in Cedar Rapids. ]

'OK,” my phone answered happily, 'here are directions to Weaver Street in Cedar Rapids.”

'No,” I shouted back, 'not Weaver - Bever, B-E-V-E-R, you moron!”

I admit I may have included a basic 15th century adjective.

The phone snapped back with an admonishing, 'Now, now.”

In any case, it turns out I wasn't even close to being the first to raise a slightly paranoiac red flag about the shadowy paths down which complete technological reliance can lead us. Socrates - 470 or so to 399 B.C. - grumbled that as more people wrote down their own musings, and other people read them, people relied less on their own memories.

'People didn't have to memorize everything anymore. They could look it up,” points out Nicholas Carr in 'The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”

I wish I had a bitcoin for every time someone has said, 'I don't know, I'll Google it.” And for every occasion of tripping over the word 'it's” when the writer surely meant 'its.”

So much for the so-called Renaissance Man - the well-rounded person who knows more than a little about just about everything - or at least about a lot of things.

But Carr goes on to note that writing stuff down for others to read has an upside. It also 'provided people with a far greater and more diverse supply of facts, opinions, ideas and stories than had been available before … .”

And did that over time make people less smart, more shallow?

Carr goes on the cite research done in the 1970s by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Eric Kandel that contends that trick to retaining information - memory - is attentiveness: 'For a memory to persist, the incoming information must be thoroughly and deeply processed,” Kandel wrote.

In other words, Carr says, 'The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory.”

But he doesn't completely dismiss Socrates's 'hey, you kids, get off my lawn” concerns, either. If we 'outsource” our memories - rely upon the Internet to know everything for us - our culture will wither, he writes.

So, should we be alarmed about counting on machines - whether we're anguishing over books or the Internet - to do our thinking and remembering for us? Or conclude that's crazy talk, and that civilization is as safe as can be and, as Jackson Brown once said, tongue in cheek, all just go back to sleep?

The recommendation to read 'The Shallows” came from Mark Nolte, president of the Iowa City Area Development Group, when he stopped by The Gazette offices a couple weeks ago. He also mentioned 'The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present,” a tiny book published this spring.

(I wrote down the titles right after he suggested them, knowing I likely wouldn't recall them later. Ha.)

In 'The Age of Earthquakes,” Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist claim we of the planet Earth are more connected than ever - 'The last time humanity had so much in common was when a few remaining cave people sat out the last Ice Age,” they write.

But they don't mean commonality in that we all eat lunch together, go bowling or even like each other that much. They mean in that we all have at our fingertips, literally, access to huge amounts of the same information via the Internet.

And with this phenomenal amount of technological change and ongoing information dumping comes a fair amount of angst, they say.

As a remedy, the authors suggest we need to adapt, make ourselves smarter. They're counting on the singularity.

Not the singularity from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which had something to do with traveling through black holes. This would be the singularity of mathematicians and futurists who foresee a day of 'superintelligence through technological means.”

When that time arrives - the actual ETA shifts and depends on whom you ask - machines will be smarter than we are - think Skynet, but maybe friendly. Or we'll have found a way to combine our knowledge with the machines and work together.

Which frankly seems not all that science-fictiony, given our nearly 24/7 dependence on tech.

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote.

The thing about magic, I think, is we also need to keep in mind it's just that, magic - it can't replace the real world, and we need to be able to remember the difference between the two.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise and business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com