{"id":18480,"date":"2014-09-23T19:26:24","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T02:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/\/new\/\/?p=18480"},"modified":"2015-06-08T11:55:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-08T18:55:00","slug":"how-has-technology-changed-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/how-has-technology-changed-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"How has technology changed the world? (Clive Thompson)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/how-has-technology-changed-the-world\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-18484\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-18484\" src=\"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Man-versus-Machine-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Clive Thompson\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a> Man competes or collaborates with machine? Smarter Than You Think<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. \u00a0But how has technology changed the world? Is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes. \u00a0Join CJ as she interviews Clive Thompson\u2019s about his book \u201cSmarter Than You Think&#8221; on the benefits of \u00a0emerging technologies and how we can collaborate with machines to create a positive future.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>YouTube Video with Clive Thompson &#8211; Smarter Than You Think<\/h2>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"How has technology changed the world? (Clive Thompson)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bKmnwGAEXuo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.iheart.com\/widget\/?showId=25229902&amp;episodeId=27039051\" width=\"398\" height=\"224\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<h2>Ten Ways Technology is Making Us Smarter<\/h2>\n<p>Blog post written by Clive Thompson and republished from http:\/\/thepenguinpress.com\/<\/p>\n<div class=\"container clearfix\">\n<div class=\"main\">\n<div class=\"constrainer clearfix\">\n<article id=\"post-162\" class=\"post\"><b>1. The power of thinking out loud: <\/b>Before the Internet, people rarely wrote. Now nearly everyone does\u2014and they do it in public, online. We\u2019re \u201cpublic thinkers,\u201d pouring out our ideas and observations and arguments, about 36 million books worth of prose a day. All this writing sharpens our thought. It produces the \u201caudience effect\u201d (we take our ideas more seriously when we know others will be reading and critiquing them) and the \u201cgeneration effect\u201d (we\u2019re better able to remember things we write about.)<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>2. Group-solving big problems<\/b>: When we think in public, we quickly find people who share our passions\u2014and then we collaborate on projects or problems too big for one person to tackle. That includes silly and fun things (groups of Japanese teenagers subtitling entire English TV series in twenty-four hours) and important ones (players of the Fold.it online game, who solved a decade-old HIV mystery in only three weeks).<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><span id=\"more-1982\"><\/span><b>3. Social ESP: <\/b>All those little \u201cstatus updates\u201d add up to a lot. When you use Facebook or Twitter to follow friends, family, or interesting strangers, the constant stream of tiny updates gives you what psychologists call \u201cambient awareness\u201d\u2014an ESP-like sense of what\u2019s going on in the minds and lives of others. Using ambient awareness, families stay in closer contact, creative workers find new ideas, and Fortune 500 companies are becoming 25% more productive.<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>4. The power of \u201cweak links\u201d:<\/b> Living online allows us to keep in touch not only with our closest companions, but with so-called \u201cweak links\u201d: People we only know slightly. Despite their name, weak links are incredibly useful\u2014they bring the most useful and fresh information into our lives. Weak links bring us the best job offers, a wider array of political views, and new opportunities. (When I was househunting in New York, I found my new home via a weak link on Facebook.)<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>5. Civic life reboots: <\/b>Online expression is helping reboot civic life. Studies show people who are heavily active online are also more civic-minded, doing <i>offline <\/i>work to help society. Despite our fears about echo chambers, these people also hear a wider array of political views than others. Plus, all that online talk often leads to social change; it helps erode \u201cpluralistic ignorance\u201d, our tendency to tolerate injustice because we worry we\u2019re the only ones who object. Online tools have helped drive the quest for justice worldwide\u2014from Trayvon Martin in the U.S. to the Arab Spring.<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>6. Infinite memory: <\/b>It used to be hard to record our lives. Today it\u2019s the opposite: We have thousands of emails, pictures, videos, and texts documenting what we\u2019ve done, what we\u2019ve said, and where we\u2019ve been. This utterly transforms the way we reminisce. \u201cLifeloggers\u201d like Gordon Bell\u2014a 78-year-old millionaire with a seven-decade personal archive\u2014uses daily random pictures from his huge archive to remind him of events he\u2019d long forgotten. Others in the \u201cquantified self\u201d movement use their lifelogs to spy patterns in their lives: One woman helped treat her depression by studying the ebb and flow of her moods.<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>7. New ways to learn and teach:<\/b> In the hands of smart teachers, digital tools are revitalizing how schools work. Teachers are \u201cflipping\u201d their classrooms\u2014having students absorb lectures at home, then doing homework in class, where they can get one-on-one help. Math software like the Khan Academy lets kids work at their own pace, so talented kids can race ahead (sometimes several grade levels) while teachers can more quickly identify students needing one-on-one help. And writing explodes: Students who do \u201cpublic thinking\u201d\u2014everything from blogging to contributing to Wikipedia\u2014produce prose that is better, longer, and more carefully researched.<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>8. New literacies: <\/b>Literacy used to mean text: Reading and writing. But now we\u2019re learning to express ourselves through powerful <i>new<\/i> forms\u2014like video, photography, and even data. They\u2019re becoming as flexible as pencil-and-paper for recording an idea and sharing it with someone else. Political junkies use data tools like \u201cword clouds\u201d to analyze the speeches of politicians; TV fans do frame-by-frame breakdowns of their favorite shows; Chinese citizens thwart their country\u2019s censors by using Photoshop to produce clever, acerbic LOL-cat style agitprop.<\/article>\n<article class=\"post\"><b>9. Instant information: <\/b>Google doesn\u2019t have to make you stupid. Quite the opposite: Studies show we\u2019re now using search engines as \u201ctransactive memory\u201d. We rely on it the same way we\u2019ve relied (for thousands of years) on the smart people around us\u2014our friends, spouses, and colleagues who can give us a quick answer to a detail we can\u2019t recall. In effect, we\u2019re treating Google like a supersmart friend who\u2019s always at our beck and call.<br \/>\n<b>10. Cognitive diversity: <\/b>Different technologies let us think in different ways. So the smartest people are learning to embrace <i>diversity\u2014<\/i>switching tools to keep their mental environment fresh. If you\u2019ve been working online for days, emailing and tweeting and connecting? Spend the weekend offline, read books, use the distraction-free time to slow-bake ideas.<\/p>\n<h2>About Clive Thompson<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/how-has-technology-changed-the-world\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-18504\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-18504\" src=\"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Clive-Thompson1-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Clive Thompson\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><em>New York Times Magazine<\/em><span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span>and a columnist for<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><em>Wired<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>As a child growing up in Toronto of the 1970s and 80s, Clive Thompson became fascinated with the first \u201chome computers\u201d\u2014the ones you plugged into your TV, like the Commodore 64, and programmed using BASIC. He was hooked, spending hours writing video games, music programs, and simple forms of artificial intelligence. The obsession stuck with him, even as he went to the University of Toronto to study poetry and political science. When he became a magazine writer in the 1990s, the Internet erupted into the mainstream, and he began reporting on how digital tools\u2014everything from email to digital photography to instant messaging\u2014was changing society.<\/p>\n<p>Clive started out pessimistic about the impact of the Internet on life. He worried, like many social critics before him, that society and civility would fall off a cliff. But over the next twenty years he realized that when everyday people were given remarkable powers of self-expression on a global scale, amazing things happened more often than not: Wikipedia, YouTube \u201cresponse\u201d conversations, collaborative art, crazy new forms of writing like TV recaps, collaborative problem-solving, and the ESP-like awareness that comes from the status-update universe.<\/p>\n<p>Today, Thompson is one of the most prominent technology writers, respected for doing deeply-reported, long-form magazine stories that get beyond headlines and harness the insights of science, literature, history and philosophy. He specializes in writing not merely on the inventors of technologies, but about how everyday people use them\u2014often quite unpredictably. In addition to the<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><em>New York Times Magazine<\/em><span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span>and<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><em>Wired<\/em>, he writes for<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><em>Mother Jones<\/em><span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span>and<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><em>Smithsonian<\/em>. He is one of the longest-running bloggers, having launched his science-and-tech blog<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><a title=\"Collision Detection\" href=\"http:\/\/www.collisiondetection.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">Collision Detection<\/a><span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span>since 2002. In his spare time he\u2019s also a musician, performing in<span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><a title=\"The Delorean Sisters\" href=\"http:\/\/deloreansisters.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Delorean Sisters<\/a><span class=\"apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span>and writing original music as part of the duo Cove. He is married and lives in Brooklyn with his two children.<\/p>\n<p>#clive thompson wired,\u00a0how new technology is changing our lives,\u00a0robots for humanity,robots taking jobs, ethics, artificial consciousness<\/p>\n<footer><\/footer>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Man competes or collaborates with machine? Smarter Than You Think It\u2019s undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. \u00a0But how has technology changed the world? Is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes. \u00a0Join CJ as she interviews Clive Thompson\u2019s about his book \u201cSmarter Than You Think&#8221; on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,56,55,58],"tags":[381,405,382,406,407,408],"yst_prominent_words":[5841,5839,5844,5848,5837,5847,2256,2551,5846,785,591,5843,5845,3733,5849,5840,5842,5838,5836,1005],"class_list":["post-18480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-show-archives","category-politics","category-business","tag-artificial-consciousness","tag-clive-thompson-wired","tag-ethics-of-artificial-intelligence","tag-how-new-technology-is-changing-our-lives","tag-robots-for-humanity","tag-robots-taking-jobs"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/bigstock-human-robot-competition-34423235-compressed.jpg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18480"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19752,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18480\/revisions\/19752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18480"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fireitupwithcj.com\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=18480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}