LaGuardia College
Aaron Straker
10/21/10
“We now engage in cyborgian activity all day long”. I can agree with this quote mainly through personal experience. We all use Google/the internet all the time to find information. Facebook and twitter tells us what were interested in. Also activities with your iPod or mp3 player to listen to music. Or your cell phone to contact your friends. You switch between many electronic devices on a daily basis.
Facebook can be used for almost everything now. You probably wouldn’t need a phone if you had a facebook. People can still contact you. Your friends can easily write on your wall, private message or just chat with you. You can even plan events on facebook. Invite people to the event they have the choice to say yes, no or maybe. This is both good and bad. The good part is you’re going to get things that you’re interested in. Everyone likes to see things that they’re interested in. But the bad is more than the good. Why does the internet know what you’re interested in? Why is it storing that information about you? What is it used for and who sees it?
Google doesn’t allow us to think. Instead of solving the problem most people run to google. This is something even I do. If I don’t know a word I’ll just google it. Instead of brainstorming and thinking of the possibilities. Maybe these websites have taken away most if not all of our creativity. There are websites where you see others opinions. Such as imdb to see if a movie is good or not. People just can’t see a movie they have to search others opinions.
Like the article says some people have limits on things such as the internet. “People who are thrilled by personal technology are the ones who have optimized their process they know how and when to rely on machine intelligence.” I don’t if I’m home I’ll be on the internet most of the time. But there people can go on the internet for maybe 5 minutes then go off and do something else. Or these people can log onto facebook get what they need then log off. While others log on and off all the time. This similar to the advanced chess game. “In fact the overall winner wasn’t one of the grandmasters or supercomputers; it was a pair of twenty something amateurs using run of the mill PCs and inexpensive apps.” This can be the same thing with google and facebook. Knowing when to consult the software and when to ignore its advice. “As Kasparov later put it, a weak human with a machine can be better than a strong human with a machine if the weak human has a better process.
But everyone is different in their own ways. It all depends on how you can use these tools. Or if you rely on them too much. “As we face that trade off, figuring out to integrate machine intelligence into our personal lives becomes the key challenge”. This is something that I and many others have to learn how to do. “Ultimately, the real question is, what sort of cyborg do you want to be?”
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