Nicholas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr speaks about his new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, with Google's Peter Norvig - interesting pairing, good discussion.

Author Nicholas Carr in conversation with Google's Peter Norvig

Introduction by INFORUM President Josh McHugh.

Carr writes: "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski," in his Atlantic Monthly cover story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

He shares his theory on the Internet as the culprit against civilization's progress, making the case that the it has diminished our ability to think deeply.

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is "widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement," according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, "lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis," said the New York Times. His latest book is, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr's books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Peter Norvig is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. At Google Inc he was Director of Search Quality, responsible for the core web search algorithms from 2002-2005, and has been Director of Research from 2005 on.

Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence.

Tags: technology, internet, Psychology, culture, Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, FORA.tv, The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Peter Norvig