Human intelligence is withering as computers do more, but there’s a solution.

As we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid.

Carr takes us on a journey from the work and early theory of Adam Smith and Alfred North Whitehead to the latest research into human attention, memory, and happiness, culminating in a moving meditation on how we can use technology to expand the human experience.

We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That's all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?

When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

What the internet is doing to our brains.

Today’s always-on web is a perpetually distractive medium that is undermining our ability to think deep thoughts, read deep books and engage in deep conversations.

Nicholas Carr’s blog on technology, culture, and economics.

The hidden negatives outweigh the positives. Under our noses, one of the biggest ever shifts in power between people and big institutions is taking place, disguised in the language of inclusion and transparency.

In my upcoming new book, <em>The Internet Is Not the Answer</em>, I argue that the networked revolution has, so far, been an enormous failure.

Andrew Keen, a twenty-year veteran of the tech industry, traces the technological and economic history of the Internet from its founding in the 1960s through the rise of the big data companies to the increasing attempts to monetize almost every human activity, and investigates how the Internet is reconfiguring our world—often at great cost.

Andrew Keen is known as the “Antichrist of Silicon Valley”. He calls Google a monster, Uber a bad idea and wants governments to regulate both.

Rather than the answer to our contemporary problems, the Internet, that human-computer symbiosis that J. C. R. Licklider believed “would save humanity,” is actually diminishing most aspects of our lives.

In a panel discussion on personal data collection and the internet, Andrew Keen argues that Facebook, Google, and the rest reduce and trivialize us by treating people exclusively as consumers, as data.