The new issue of Wired features an interview with me about The Big Switch and, in particular, the broader implications of the arrival of our new World Wide Computer. The interview was conducted by Spencer Reiss. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Wired: When does the big switch from the desktop to the data cloud happen?
Carr: Most people are already there. Young people in particular spend way more time using so-called cloud apps – MySpace, Flickr, Gmail – than running old-fashioned programs on their hard drives. What’s amazing is that this shift from private to public software has happened without us even noticing it …
Wired: Back to the future – HAL lives!
Carr: The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick’s vision wasn’t that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We’re beginning to process information as if we’re nodes; it’s all about the speed of locating and reading data. We’re transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.
Elsewhere on the newsstand, the current issue of Fast Company gives The Big Switch a nice notice, calling it a “must-read” for 2008 and, in a reference to Alvin Toffler’s much-discussed 1970 book, describing it as “Future Shock for the web-apps era.”
“[T]he machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.”
Just to say that this idea seems to be the most stricking of all: in addition to now common “ping, RAM, system error” metaphors, friendship is becoming become a more formal notion.
As every human activity is being translated into a digital one, we need to supply the computer with the broader mind power of the human in order for the tool itself to widen its possibilities, no longer just computers as tools to widen human capacities. It can be said that in the end it’s humans who take advantage of the human-computer connection and it’s still humans who decide what to process and elaborate. This is true in a way but there is a great tendency to digitalize non computable activities even if this requires a massive human intervention, as Amazon Mechanical Turk. In this regard humans are becoming more and more like servomechanisms of technology, as McLuhan predicted.
I read your advanced reading copy over the last two days – GREAT work.
I’m now re-reading Toffler’s latest work “Revolutionary Wealth;” I believe the two books go hand-in-hand.
Humans lived for over 100,000 years in nomadic tribal groups of around 150 individuals. Our modern city/suburban cultures are hardly natural; the world of on-line communities and virtual friendships are another variation to which we’re equally ill-suited.
And yet, we have (obviously) prospered through our ability to adapt. We will likewise do so as we spend more of our lives on-line. However, it’s worth remembering that we’re still just clever monkeys in clothes… only now with Facebook profiles.