How good software makes us stupid

I am bloody sick of that troll Nicholas Carr.<p>Exactly the same things were said of printing - conservatives said that we would lose the ability to remember things when all knowledge could be looked up in a book.<p>Exactly the same things were said of slide rules and calculators - that we would lose the ability to reason as our ability to calculate atrophied.<p>The obvious debunking of Carr's argument is the incredible level of skill so many computer users exhibit. Obviously we HNers are all aware of how bloody difficult programming is, but we forget just how complex a lot of very ordinary software is. Watch a skilled Photoshop operator or a really good Starcraft player in action and you'll see Carr's hypothesis go down in flames. Something as mundane as Excel is easily more complex than any system in the world just a few decades ago.<p>Carr is at the bottom of a very long line of dreary, reactionary trolls, cursing that the young people today don't know how easy they've got it, that they're going soft with their newfangled tools.

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. "<p>Alfred North Whitehead, <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead</a>

&#62;<i>"Months later - the people who had the unhelpful software actually could remember how to do the puzzle, and the people with the helpful software couldn't."</i><p>In the real world people with helpful software can take advantage of their time saved by tackling even harder classes of problems that people with unhelpful software never even had the time to get to.

Socrates was grumbling that writing things down was impairing our ability to learn things by heart.<p>As far as I am concerned, the more rote memorization that things machines can take off my brain's to-do list, the more time+space I can devote to higher-level thinking.

All of these dire predictions of better technology dumbing us down are getting tiresome.<p>People who are lazy, and wouldn't bother memorizing a route anyway, will be helped by something like SatNav or Google Maps -- and yes, probably use them as a crutch. But it's better than them <i>not being able to get anywhere</i>. Me? Having instant access to a birds-eye view of every road in my city (Los Angeles) has given me the tools I need to memorize many routes, and is one of the reasons I can drive around this city so effectively.<p>Technology is a tool. Use it how you will.

But they've missed the true comparison.<p>The question isn't: "Would a London cabby using satnav software without having learned the city do better than a London cabby who learned the city?"<p>The question is: "Would a London cabby using satnav software do better than one without - both having learned the city?"<p>In other words: Assuming good satnav software that knew current traffic conditions and historic average speeds of the roads, with an easy interface to offer multiple routing options that are easily changeable (for instance) - wouldn't that be <i>helpful</i> to a cabby vs. a cabby that didn't have that extra tool?<p>I don't think it's fair to compare human+tech vs. human-only performance with no tech. Better to compare them <i>with</i> tech, since the whole point is that technology is available and used.

We're heading towards a mental man-machine symbiosis. Think of all your gadgetry as a co-processor.

The Knowledge is a very hard test. It can take 3 years to pass, and you need to learn 320 set routes within 6 miles of Charing Cross. My aunt did The Knowledge anf now drives a black cab by day, and a rather expensive Mercedes sports car the rest of the time.

Give me studies, not arguments. Using tools - and "good software" are just tools - that free us from having to use intelligence for a task allows us to direct that intelligence to <i>other</i> tasks.<p>Yes, I'm not as good at arithmetic as a technical person from 50 or even 30 years ago. But I'm freed from having to do all of that myself so I can focus energy to what I actually care about.

This article makes no real sense, does the author (of the book) have any scientific evidence for any of his claims?

Perhaps an alternative view: Good software makes the lazy lazier?