Why would anyone bother playing? What’s the challenge?
NICHOLAS CARR
that scene. What happens to HAL and Dave, and how does
this outcome support his argument? 4. How does Carr use transitions to connect the parts of his
text and to help readers follow his train of thought? (See Chapter 8 to help you think about how transitions help
develop an argument.) 5. In his essay on pages 441-61, Clive Thompson reaches a
different conclusion than Carr does, saying that “At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, com- municate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers. But on balance .. . what is happening is deeply positive.” Write a paragraph or two discussing how Carr might respond. Wnat would he agree
with, and what would he disagree with? 6. This article sparked widespread debate and conversation
when it first appeared in 2008, and the discussion contin- ues today. Go to theysayiblog.com and click on “Are We in a Race against the Machine?” to read some of what’s been
written on the topic recently.
440
Smarter Than You Think:
How Technology Is Changing
Our Minds for the Better
CLIVE THOMPSON
WHo’s BETTER AT .CHESs–computers or humans? The question has long fascinated observers, perhaps because
chess seems like the ultimate display of human thought: the players sit like Rodin’s Thinker, silent, brows furrowed, mak- ing lightning-fast calculations. It’s the quintessential cognitive activity, logic as an extreme sport.
So the idea of a machine outplaying a human has always provoked both excitement and dread. In the eighteenth cen- tury, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir with his clockwork Mechanical Turk-an automaton that played an eerily good game of chess, even beating Napoleon Bonaparte. The spec- tacle was so unsettling that onlookers cried out in astonishment
CLIVE THOMPSON is a journalist and blogger who writes for the New
Y ark Times Magazine and Wired. He was awarded a 2002 Knight Science
Journalism Fellowship at MIT. He blogs at clivethompson.net. This
essay is adapted from his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology
Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013).
4 41
CLIVE THOMPSON
The Thinker, by French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) .
4 42
Smarter Than You Think
when the Turk’s gears first clicked into motion. But the gears, and the machine, were fake; in reality, the automaton was con- trolled by a chess savant cunningly tucked inside the wooden cabinet. In 1915, a Spanish inventor unveiled a genuine, honest-to-goodness robot that could actually play chess-a simple endgame involving only three pieces, anyway. A writer for Scientific American fretted that the inventor “Would Sub- stitute Machinery for the Human Mind.”
Eighty years later, in 1997, this intellectual standoff clanked to a dismal conclusion when world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in a tourna- ment of six games. Faced with a machine that could calcu- late two hundred million positions a second, even Kasparov’s notoriously aggressive and nimble style broke down. In its final game, Deep Blue used such a clever ploy-tricking Kasparov into letting the computer sacrifice a knight-that it trounced him in nineteen moves. “I lost my fighting spirit,” Kasparov said afterward, pronouncing himself “emptied completely.” Riveted, the journalists announced a winner. The cover of Newsweek proclaimed the event “The Brain’s Last Stand.” Doom-sayers predicted that chess itself was over. If machines could out-think even Kasparov, why would the game remain interesting?
NICHOLAS CARR
that scene. What happens to HAL and Dave, and how does
this outcome support his argument? 4. How does Carr use transitions to connect the parts of his
text and to help readers follow his train of thought? (See Chapter 8 to help you think about how transitions help
develop an argument.) 5. In his essay on pages 441-61, Clive Thompson reaches a
different conclusion than Carr does, saying that “At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, com- municate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers. But on balance .. . what is happening is deeply positive.” Write a paragraph or two discussing how Carr might respond. Wnat would he agree
with, and what would he disagree with? 6. This article sparked widespread debate and conversation
when it first appeared in 2008, and the discussion contin- ues today. Go to theysayiblog.com and click on “Are We in a Race against the Machine?” to read some of what’s been
written on the topic recently.
440
Smarter Than You Think:
How Technology Is Changing
Our Minds for the Better
CLIVE THOMPSON
WHo’s BETTER AT .CHESs–computers or humans? The question has long fascinated observers, perhaps because
chess seems like the ultimate display of human thought: the players sit like Rodin’s Thinker, silent, brows furrowed, mak- ing lightning-fast calculations. It’s the quintessential cognitive activity, logic as an extreme sport.
So the idea of a machine outplaying a human has always provoked both excitement and dread. In the eighteenth cen- tury, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir with his clockwork Mechanical Turk-an automaton that played an eerily good game of chess, even beating Napoleon Bonaparte. The spec- tacle was so unsettling that onlookers cried out in astonishment
CLIVE THOMPSON is a journalist and blogger who writes for the New
Y ark Times Magazine and Wired. He was awarded a 2002 Knight Science
Journalism Fellowship at MIT. He blogs at clivethompson.net. This
essay is adapted from his book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology
Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (2013).
4 41
CLIVE THOMPSON
The Thinker, by French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) .
4 42
Smarter Than You Think
when the Turk’s gears first clicked into motion. But the gears, and the machine, were fake; in reality, the automaton was con- trolled by a chess savant cunningly tucked inside the wooden cabinet. In 1915, a Spanish inventor unveiled a genuine, honest-to-goodness robot that could actually play chess-a simple endgame involving only three pieces, anyway. A writer for Scientific American fretted that the inventor “Would Sub- stitute Machinery for the Human Mind.”
Eighty years later, in 1997, this intellectual standoff clanked to a dismal conclusion when world champion Garry Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer in a tourna- ment of six games. Faced with a machine that could calcu- late two hundred million positions a second, even Kasparov’s notoriously aggressive and nimble style broke down. In its final game, Deep Blue used such a clever ploy-tricking Kasparov into letting the computer sacrifice a knight-that it trounced him in nineteen moves. “I lost my fighting spirit,” Kasparov said afterward, pronouncing himself “emptied completely.” Riveted, the journalists announced a winner. The cover of Newsweek proclaimed the event “The Brain’s Last Stand.” Doom-sayers predicted that chess itself was over. If machines could out-think even Kasparov, why would the game remain interesting? Why would anyone bother playing? What’s the challenge?