Things That Make Us Smart
I have begun reading "Things That Make Us Smart" by Donald A. Norman. The book was published in 1993, and is interesting in that it identifies patterns in technology that had yet to become prevalent at the time. One theme that Norman explores is the use of technology to create artifacts. He describes a psychology study he was performing in which subjects were supposed to memorize a list of words. He caught one of the subjects "cheating" by writing down words on the list. He realizes that this is only what an intelligent person would do. Technology is adding greatly to people's ability to create artifacts. People no longer need to memorize phone numbers, as cell phones do the task better than a person can. As technology becomes more and more ubiquitous in our lives and available at any moment, certain skills will become antiquated. In the book, Norman gives the example of someone who is extremely good at remembering long lists of numbers. This suddenly becomes much less notable when one considers that any simple database can do the same thing incomparably better. The lesson to be learned from this is that creativity and seeing patterns are skills that can not be emulated by computers. By freeing up our mind-power to concentrate on being creative, computers will indeed help us to become smarter.