Get unsmart

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"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" That’s the provocative title of an article by Nicholas Carr that appears in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It’s also somewhat misleading, because Carr’s investigation focuses mostly on the complex interactions between our brains and the media we regularly use.

Carr contrasts the differences between reading printed matter and reading information on a display. To use either medium, you depend on complex mental processes that get altered by your interaction with the media—think of it as neural programming, or reprogramming if you spent your formative years as a reader and are now by choice or necessity a Web head.

Reprogramming our brains for Web interaction has side effects. Specifically, our attention spans become shorter, reducing our ability to concentrate on a topic and to think critically about a topic. Our information-intake rates change, too. Instead of immersing ourselves in a topic and proceeding at a slow pace, we expect to get the information we need by drinking from the Internet’s fire-hose-like data stream as it whooshes past.

Test-equipment designers face a couple of challenges as a result of these Web side effects. First, if no one takes the time to read it, does a well-written and extensive printed manual add value to an instrument? Technical writers accustomed to spreading a topic over several pages will require mental reprogramming to present complex descriptions in brief paragraphs.

Second, printed instruction manuals may disappear altogether and reappear as online manuals accessible via the Web, or as extensive help functions built into the instruments. Given the choice, I favor built-in help pages because a Web connection may not always be available.

Perhaps the advent of true artificial intelligence will produce instruments that become so “smart” that they require very little human intervention to perform a complex series of tests. Imagine your reaction when a verbal command to your AgiTronix WizardScope 9000 (“Herbert”) evokes the following reply: “I’m sorry, Dave. I cannot perform that series of measurements. It would adversely affect end-of-quarter shipments and endanger profitability.”

Now, where did you put that module-extraction tool?