Kasparov Vs. Carr

How is information technology changing the way we think?  Is it making us dumber- decreasing the depth of our knowledge at the same time it increases the speed with which we process information?  Or is it a tool?  A form of mental augmentation, the combined wealth of human opinion and knowledge ubiquitously available, relieving us of the burden of rote memory?

On one side, you have the nostalgics, their position well summed in the famous essay by Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  The arguments are known well enough as to now be cliché. To paraphrase, “Using the web has robbed me of my ability to read long works like War and Peace.” and “What is happening to our ability to concentrate and focus?” 

This viewpoint is popular in the press.  Lamentations of yesterday’s bygone genius will never go out of style.  These articles can be written based on personal experience and they explain why so much in the world is broken:  newspapers can’t make money, the author’s book sales are down and of course the declining test scores of today’s youth.

For the other side we should turn to Garry Kasparov.   In a much less famous article than Carr’s, published in the New York Review of Books, Kasparov reflects on the lead up to, and eventual loss against deep blue.  In it Kasparov describes how a computer that could see all possible outcomes for up to 20 moves ahead, eventually beat him.  Rather than regret the passing of human supremacy, Kasparov recognized the opportunity it presented.  He had a theory that a human paired with a computer could be a more powerful opponent than either, thus Advanced Chess was born.   In a freestyle match on Playchess.com, in which any combination of players and computers could compete, it was a pair of amateur chess players and three computers that won, beating dedicated chess supercomputers, and grandmasters with state of the art laptops.  As Kasparov put it, “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”