Which is smarter at chess-humans or computers?
CLIVE THOMPSON
brings us back to our original question here: Which is smarter
at chess-humans or computers?
Neither. It’s the two together, working side by side.
We’re all playing advanced chess these days. We just haven’t
learned to appreciate it. Our tools are everywhere, linked with our minds, working zo
in tandem. Search engines answer our most obscure questions; status updates give us an ESP-like awareness of those around us; online collaborations let far-flung collaborators tackle prob- lems too tangled for any individual. We’re becoming less like Rodin’s Thinker and more like Kasparov’s centaurs. This trans- formation is rippling through every part of our cognition- how we learn, how we remember, and how we act upon that knowledge emotionally, intellectually, and politically. As with Cramton and Stephen, these tools can make even the amateurs among us radically smarter than we’d be on our own, assuming (and this is a big assumption) we understand how they work. At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more communicate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers. But on balance, I’d
argue, what is happening is deeply positive .. · · Th ” d d . d” In a sense, this is an ancient story. e exten e mm
theory of cognition argues that the reason humans are so intel- lectually dominant is that we’ve always outsourced bits of cogni- tion, using tools to scaffold our thinking into ever-more-rarefied realms. Printed books amplified our memory. Inexpensive paper and reliable pens made it possible to externalize our thoughts quickly. Studies show that our eyes zip around the ~age w~~le performing long division on paper, using the handwntten dtgtts as a form of prosthetic short-term memory. “These resources
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Smarter Than You Think
enable us to pursue manipulations and juxtapositions of ideas and data that would quickly baffle the unaugmented brain,” as Andy Clark, a philosopher of the extended mind, writes.
Granted, it can be unsettling to realize how much thinking already happens outside our skulls. Culturally, we revere the Rodin ideal-the belief that genius breakthroughs come from ~ur gray matter alone. The physicist Richard Feynman once got mto an argument about this with the historian Charles Weiner. F~ynman .understood the extended mind; he knew that writing hts equattons and ideas on paper was crucial to his thought. But when Weiner looked over a pile of Feynman’s notebooks, he called them a wonderful “record of his day-to-day work.” No, no, Feynman replied testily. They weren’t a record of his thinking process. They were his thinking process:
“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.
“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”
“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?”
Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about. The printed word helped make our cognition linear and abstract, along with vastly enlarging our stores of knowledge. Newspapers shrank the world; then the telegraph shrank it even n:ore dramatically. With every innovation, cultural prophets btckered over whether we were facing a technological apocalypse or a utopia. Depending on which Victorian-age pundit you asked, the telegraph was either going to usher in an era of world peace (“I.t i~’ impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer extst, as Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick intoned) or drown us in a Sargasso of idiotic trivia (“We are eager to tunnel