( A five-minute read if you don’t want to be Googled)

Artificial intelligence is changing the world we live in but are we all going to end up scratching our behinds wishing we were dead. Turned into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Our thoughts and actions scripted as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm.

As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

The perfect coordination and optimization of our day- to – day lives controlled by Google Monopoly inc.

Google is draining of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,”

Why because we will be in a state of constant Google observation with the entire world connected to the world they wish to present.

At the moment Google control over 65% of all searches, ( WHICH NO ONE KNOWS HOW IT WORKS)

Google is not required by Law to serve everyone nor for that matter is Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter.

Nearly every iPhone operates on its Android operating system.

WE ARE ESSENTIALLY SENTENCED TO A GOOGLE DIGITAL DEATH.

They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism.

Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work.

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well.

Google, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does.

Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it.

What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling.

It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

And because we would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” we would “be thought very knowledgeable when we are for the most part quite ignorant.” We would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” This is not good, as the world is in need of wisdom more than ever.

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

If we lose  quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in ourselves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

As Richard Foreman so beautifully describes it, we’ve been pounded into instantly-available pancakes, becoming the unpredictable but statistically critical synapses in the whole Gödel-to-Google net. Does the resulting mind (as Richardson would have it) belong to us? Or does it belong to something else?

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so—and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

Reading, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is.

The media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.

Circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

The tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today.

Where does it end?

Mr Page of google said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.”

The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought.  It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

There’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine.

Google as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”

I know that Google will argue the toss and indeed other than they becoming a monopolizing influence I would have great praise.

All comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the Bin.