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mhhf1ve
mhhf1ve
7/7/2016 1:44:15 PM
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Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
Psychologists, by the way, have seen a possibly spurious rise in IQ over the last 100yrs. Sure, IQ isn't a great measure of intelligence, but it's a standardized metric that has existed for many decades.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx

The human population is probably not getting any smarter or dumber, but we are more educated than we were 100 yrs ago. It depends on what kind of education we provide -- and that will have an effect on what kids know.

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mhhf1ve
mhhf1ve
7/7/2016 1:34:48 PM
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Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
JohnBarnes,

I never said the internet is making us smarter! I doubt the human brain evolves on a time scale in which the internet would make any difference to our brains. Our brains are flexible. It's a double edged sword that way. So if we exercise our collective brains in the right way, we can get millions of high school students taking AP calculus. If we don't, we get millions who just sit around watching reality TV and youtube videos all day.

All is not lost. The human population still has plenty of genetic variation. Unless we start implementing some GATTACA-like rules, genetic chance will generally give us a top 1 percentile that's smart enough to figure out nuclear fusion and general artificial intelligence software. If we do start trying to genetically engineer our kids, well.. then who knows what kind of population we'll have. Maybe 50% geniuses. Maybe 100% good-looking idiots.

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
7/7/2016 7:52:56 AM
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Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
mhhf1ve, batye,

No, the idea that the internet is making us smarter, let alone forcing us to become smarter, is just wrong, contradicted by an abundance of evidence in everything from the decline of working vocabulary in high school students (decreased about 40% since 1960) to the explosion of "executive function disorders" in colleges (students who can't remember or follow a list of steps) to the loss of ready-recall in young "skiled" workers (the "skilling" just does not stick anymore). A few engineers and scientists have to be very smart to make the internet work better, but for the vast majority of people, it's a pacifier that slowly makes them dumber -- which is exactly what our present market needs, uncritical consumers with poor impulse control.

Thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, however, student and general population self-esteem is reaching an all time high.

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batye
batye
7/7/2016 3:45:10 AM
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Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
@mhhf1ve interesting observation and I trust you are right it like technology changing us... force us to become smarter to survive in new reality... or new IT age :) and no other way around...

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mhhf1ve
mhhf1ve
7/6/2016 8:32:11 PM
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Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
JohnBarnes,

I think I understand what you're saying, but let me ask you: "do you think there has been irreversible genetic brain damage in the younger generations?" Adults who are over 30yo now had to memorize phone numbers and maybe the periodic table and multiplication tables up to 12x12 or maybe even 15x15... Whereas adults in the 1500s were largely illiterate, but some educated people back then could memorize amazing amounts of materials, quoting bible passages easily and reciting classic prose or poetry. Have our modern brains atrophied since the Renaissance or since 4BC? I don't think so. I think our brains have been trained to perform and focus on different tasks. Sure, there are some kids who can't seem to put together a logical argument, but that's probably always been true. Are we running out of people who can? Or are there more people than ever before in history who can understand Calculus? Maybe we're not cultivating Einsteins or geniuses like Srinivasa Ramanujan... but I think if you were to survey the entire population of humans today, you might be surprised at how functional people are. 

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
7/6/2016 8:02:55 AM
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Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
mhhf1ve,

 I think we do disagree somewhat, but perhaps more in emphasis. Students can't do much in the way of critical, original, or independent thought if they have to look everything up, because they never know when they should be looking things up.  That means not only loading tne memory with a solid grounding of plain old dull facts, via the efficient memory loading techniques of rote and repetition, but also training the student to not just pull answers back in the same format given, but to pull them out in useful combinations and from different access paths. All of which efficient search engines teach them NOT to do.

It's the phenomenon very observable in math instruction (where I've spent a bit too much of my life) that a student who doesn't have the multiplication table reflexively has to use too much processing space to get through basic computations so that they don't have room for anything higher, and has little to no ability to notice patterns or situations that they can exploit in their work. It's just as observable in students who read all of history as if everyone from the dawn of time had the ideas and attitudes of the two big political parties during the Obama administration, or who can see nothing in a work of literature except whether they liked the characters and who would play the lead. All the information in the world can be right next to the student but until they have enough memory in their minds, not in their gadgets to access it and work with it directly, it does them no good.

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mhhf1ve
mhhf1ve
7/5/2016 1:05:10 PM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
JohnBarnes,

I agree (and I was being a bit facetious with my suggestion of a Super-Clippy), but I also think part of the problem with students now is the gamification of education -- where kids just try to optimize their performance on tests in order to get the required certifications for whatever the educational systems currently demand. Standardized testing creates an environment that doesn't encourage honest learning as much as rote memorization and a goal of meeting minimum standards.

Optimistically, there will *always* be a small population of people who are learning because they enjoy the subject or simply want to improve themselves. Pessimisically, that small population may never increase in size.... 

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batye
batye
7/5/2016 11:19:40 AM
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Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
@mhhf1ve yes, you are right, as with everything in life, you never know... or what if ? question will always be here :) ... price of technology enetering our life...

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batye
batye
7/5/2016 11:19:40 AM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
@mhhf1ve yes, you are right, as with everything in life, you never know... or what if ? question will always be here :) ... price of technology enetering our life...

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JohnBarnes
JohnBarnes
7/5/2016 7:28:28 AM
User Rank
Platinum
Re: The biggest problem with Google brain is it kills creativity
mhf1ve,

I think "much more likely not" because the inability to hold a substantial body of ideas in memory and operate on them there is both exactly what is being atrophied and exactly what would be needed to get any benefit from Super-Clippy's points. And at least the first few generations of it will require that students actually understand what it is telling them. Large numbers of students already think of academic writing as producing an acceptable/salable product that must get past an inspector who will then authorize paying for it in grades, with no connection to any mental process at any step in the process (which is part of why so many of them have no problem with having someone else do the work).  Giving them one more quality-checker will raise the prices at the paper-writing services and probably induce the creation of "auto-think" AIs, but it will only increase, not mitigate, the disaster that is Google-brain.

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