Smarter Than You Think

How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

Clive Thompson

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780007427789
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Culture populaire

Notes

Chapter 1: The Rise of the Centaurs

1. In the eighteenth century, Wolfgang von Kempelen caused a stir: Tom Standage, The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2002), 22–28, 102–19, 194–221.

2. In 1915, a Spanish inventor unveiled a genuine, honest-to-goodness robot: “Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices,” Scientific American Supplement, No. 2079 (November 6, 1915): 296–98.

3. Faced with a machine that could calculate two hundred million positions a second: “Deep Blue,” IBM, accessed March 19, 2013, www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/deepblue/.

4. “I lost my fighting spirit”: Bruce Weber, “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov,” The New York Times, May 12, 1997, accessed March 19, 2013, www.nytimes.com/1997/05/12/nyregion/swift-and-slashing-computer-topples-kasparov.html.

5. “emptied completely”: Frederic Friedel, “Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue,” ChessBase, May 1997, accessed March 19, 2013, www.chessbase.com/columns/column.asp?pid=146.

6. “The Brain’s Last Stand”: Newsweek, May 5, 1997.

7. Doomsayers predicted that chess itself was over: Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer,” The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010, accessed March 19, 2013, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/.

8. Then Kasparov did something unexpected: Portions of my writing on advanced chess appeared in Clive Thompson, “The Cyborg Advantage,” Wired, April 2010, accessed March 21, 2013, www.wired.com/magazine/2010/03/st_thompson_cyborgs/.

9. Chess grand masters had predicted for years: Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.”

10. Human chess players learn by spending years studying: Garry Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), Kindle edition.

11. If you go eight moves out in a game of chess: Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.”

12. “One, the best one”: Diego Rasskin-Gutman, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, trans. Deborah Klosky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 50.

13. Together, they would form what chess players later called a centaur … fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw: Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess, Kindle edition.

14. In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament: My account of the 2005 “freestyle” chess tournament comes from personal interviews with Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, as well as these reports: Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess; Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer”; Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, “The Dark Horse Theory,” Chess Horizons, October–December 2005, 17–20, 40, accessed March 19, 2013, masschess.org/Chess_Horizons/Articles/2005-10_sample.pdf; “PAL / CSS report from the dark horse’s mouth,” ChessBase, June 6, 2005, accessed March 19, 2013, en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4002467.

15. Hydra, the most powerful chess computer in existence: My description of Hydra comes from an e-mail interview with Hydra’s creator, Chrilly Donninger, and the following reports: Tom Mueller, “Your Move,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2005, 62–69; Jon Speelman, “Chess,” The Observer (UK), July 3, 2005, 19; Dylan Loeb McClain, “In Chess, Masters Again Fight Machines,” The New York Times, June 21, 2005, accessed March 19, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2005/06/21/arts/21mast.html.

16. with software you could buy for sixty dollars: Mueller, “Your Move,” 65.

17. The “extended mind” theory of cognition … short-term memory: I owe much of my discussion of the extended mind to the work of Andy Clark, specifically Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and a personal interview with the author.

18. “These resources enable us to pursue”: Andy Clark, “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” in Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, eds. Peter Carruthers and Jill Boucher (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 173.

19. “I actually did the work on the paper”: Clark, Supersizing the Mind, xxv.

20. The printed word helped make our cognition linear and abstract: Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2010). I’m thinking specifically about his argument in the chapter “Writing Restructures Consciousness,” 77–114.

21. “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist”: Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick, The Story of the Telegraph, and a History of the Great Atlantic Cable (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1858), 22. Accessed March 19, 2013, via Google Books, books.google.com/books?id=NFVHAAAAIAAJ.

22. “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic”: Henry D. Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 50–51.

23. called this the bias of a new tool: Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, introduction by Alexander John Watson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

24. “tools for thought”: Rheingold introduced the term in his 1985 book of that title, reprinted in 2000: Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

25. “The future is already here”: Garson O’Toole, “The Future Has Arrived—It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet,” Quote Investigator, January 24, 2012, accessed March 19, 2013, quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/.

26. “that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing … return to barbarism”: Blair, Too Much to Know, Kindle edition.

27. In the sixteenth century, humanity faced: My analysis of early publishing here owes much to Ann Blair’s book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), Kindle edition, and a personal interview with the author.

28. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think”: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: Norton, 2010), 5.

29. precisely why societies have engineered massive social institutions: I owe this point to Stephen Pinker, “Mind over Mass Media,” The New York Times, June 10, 2010, last accessed March 19, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/opinion/11Pinker.html.

30. “There will eventually be neuroscientific explanations”: Gary Marcus, “Neuroscience Fiction,” News Desk (a New Yorker blog), Dec. 2, 2012, accessed March 19, 2013, www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/what-neuroscience-really-teaches-us-and-what-it-doesnt.html.

31. a single brain-scanning study that specifically probed how people’s brains respond to using the Web: Carr, The Shallows, 120–22.

32. team...