Don’t worry about remembering stuff: Google will soon become your
brain
Here’s a thought experiment that was originally inspired by (but
not drawn from) an article I read on the occasionally interesting internet blog
called “Brain Pickings”.
Suppose, if you will, that you
were somehow transported back in time to the 1920s – to be precise, let’s say
the date is 11am on 16 June 1925. Suppose also that your iPhone was in your
pocket when you entered whatever portal or machine that got you there and that it
has survived the journey.
The place you have arrived at is
a big, strange room. Directly in front of you is a wall that reaches up to your
neck, concealing most of your body. In front of this wall is a large crowd of people,
all of whom are staring at your head. They are almost exclusively male, these
people, and almost exclusively odd looking, with many of them seeming rather
unkempt and lazily dressed, and a highly disproportionate number exhibiting
extremely messy hair. Suddenly you begin to recognise a few familiar faces in
the crowd – in fact, many. You see Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Marie
Curie, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Alan Turing… a pattern rapidly reveals
itself in your mind: all of them are geniuses in their respective fields. After
a quick survey of the crowd, it becomes clear that they are, more precisely,
the one hundred sharpest minds of 1925. You feel very small and insecure. You
are just beginning to feel a deep regret about the very bold decision to travel
back to 1925 when their spokesperson (let’s just say it’s anyone but Joyce
because then I’d feel compelled to try to mimic his idiolect and I couldn’t
pull that off), steps out from the crowd, and begins to speak:
“We don’t know who you are or why
you are standing behind a wall with only your head exposed. We also don’t know
how we came to be here, or where this room is, or what purpose it normally
serves. Naturally, this is causing all of us a great deal of consternation. Nevertheless,
being all of us very practical people, we have decided to try to make something
good of this experience: we hereby challenge you to an extremely rigorous general
knowledge test.”
You feel ill. Two hundred beady genius
eyes bear down on you, burning a massive hole in your face.
“Two teams shall partake in this
quiz, namely, all of us and you. There is only one rule: none may consult a
book. Seeing as none of us have any books in our possession and the door out of
this unfurnished room is barred, this rule should be quite straightforward for
everyone to observe. Since we should like to be able to confer without a sense
of stress or urgency if the answer to a particular question does not
immediately come to one of us, we also decree that there shall be no time limit.
Naturally, however, in the event that both teams have the correct answer the
team which answers first shall be declared the winner, so there is an incentive
for rapidity.
The last matter we must clarify before
we begin pertains to the questions. You may be wondering how many of these there
shall be and how they shall be selected. Well, we have decided that there shall
be precisely one hundred questions, each of which shall be chosen and asked by
a different one of us. Evidently, he who poses the question in any given round
shall be debarred from participating in that round, assuming instead the role
of arbiter for its duration. In case you
are concerned that some of us might be tempted to abuse our powers as arbiter, I
would like to stress that the far majority of us here are, by reason of our
employ and character, interested in the truth above all else – in fact, you
might say to the detriment of all else. [Some chuckles of assent from the crowd].
As far as I’m aware, each of us here holds the view that, in general, it matters
not who utters a statement, as long as it is true. Thus, I would think it at
least extremely unlikely that any of us would engage in such malfeasance.
However, if an arbiter does whisper the
answer to our team or wrongfully declare us to be the winner, I think you may
trust the rest of us to condemn that person and annul the round. I believe this
fact ought to suffice to disabuse you of your putative concern.
Although we all aspire to probity,
as has been made clear enough, we must insist that you consent to this
questionnaire on pain of death, because we are all very eager to play it.”
“Ok,” you murmur, now wishing
with all your heart that you were back in the 21st Century where no
group of geniuses ever challenged you to rigorous questionnaires on pain of
death. The fear and distress you now feel causes you to momentarily forget that
there is no internet in 1925. You hence take your phone out of your pocket, tap
in your passcode and press Safari. As soon as Safari begins to load, however, your
mind returns. And you are just about to put the phone back in your pocket when,
suddenly, Google appears! ‘Thank god,’ you think, ‘This is actually a miracle.’
Briefly, you pause for thought, as you know that, as a metaphysical naturalist, believing that you had experienced a true miracle would
completely undermine your view on just about everything. Fortunately, after a
few seconds, a hypothesis that is more compatible with your convictions presents
itself: ‘Actually, I probably ruptured the space-time continuum, or tore a hole
in the fabric of space or something, and that means I’m standing in a tiny
patch of 21st Century space. Thank god I did create a paradox. Now I
have the chance to stick it to these titans of the 20th Century.’
Although some of these titans are
looking at your head while you look down at your phone and think these thoughts,
they have, at this point, no reason to think you’re from the 21st
Century or are holding any kind of knowledge-giving device. It just does not
cross their minds, despite how imaginative and clever these minds are.
The first question of the
rigorous questionnaire is about newts. It turns out the announcer is a
biologist with a particular expertise in amphibians, and he is the arbiter for
the first round.
“I hope it’s permissible that
this question is not really a question, strictly speaking:
List the genera of the family
Salimandrae in alphabetical order by Latin name; give also their common names
after each Latin one.”
As soon as you hear the word
“Salimandrae” you bash newts into Google and immediately click Wikipedia – but
one of the weirdest looking men in the crowd[1], has
already stepped out from the crowd and begun rattling off the list in a high,
whiny voice: “Calotriton or Spanish brook newts, Cynops or firebelly newts, Echinotriton or spiny newts, Ichthyosaura or alpine newts…”
You are quick enough onto
Wikipedia to verify his list, but you soon determine that he is too much of a
freak to slip up. Already feeling defeated, you click out of Wikipedia before
he’s even finished. And thirty seconds later, this human beanpole is getting slapped
on the back by Curie and Wittgenstein (making him wince and look harrowed), and
the biologist announcer is declaring that “Team Genius is ahead 1-0!”
You, meanwhile, have never felt
more worthless and stupid in your life, and want to die. But let’s say that the
next question is asked by James Joyce, and being both an egomaniac and a man
with a predilection for throwing spanners in works, he says, “Since it’s the 16th
of June, I was wondering whether anyone here could be prevailed upon to recite the
beginning of Part II episode 4, or “Calypso”, of my controversial, bizarre and
epic novel Ulysses. As long as
someone is able to reach the phrase “the cat cried” in their recitation, I
shall be satisfied.”[2]
You quickly type in the famous first
few words of that chapter into Google, and to your delight the room remains
silent. Although some people in the crowd are able to recall verbatim much of
what they read normally, most of them have not read Ulysses and have no desire to do so. Most of these people don’t
care for fiction of any kind, let alone the most bombastic kind imaginable. And
so, in a still silent room, you are on the website called “Genius” (funnily
enough), the one which is most used for song lyrics and always has that black
background, and you are reading aloud the chapter:
“Leopold Bloom ate with relish
the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked the thick giblet soup, the nutty
gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried
hencods’ roes […].”
Although it is evident from
Joyce’s anguished facial expressions that he does not find your accent euphonious or your voice mellifluous, when you reach the stipulated end of the passage, he
does reluctantly declare you the winner of the round.
So it’s one-all now. And let’s
say the next question, which is just a basic historical one on the number of
ships in the Spanish Armada or something, is answered first by the geniuses. But
let’s say the next one after that, a linguist-asked question on some word in
some obscure language of an Inuit tribe, is easy enough for you to look up and you
actually get it right. And let’s say the next one is a far more obscure
historical question than a Spanish Armada one, and you are again able to look
it up and get it right. And let’s say Wittgenstein asks about certain aspects
of his linguistic theories and you get that one right too. And let’s say Marie
Curie asks if anyone can give a brief biography of her, and that’s easy for you
again. And eventually, by the end of the one hundred questions, you’ve won
seventy to thirty! Against not just one phenomenal genius but one hundred, all working
together, you’ve triumphed!
After the announcer has declared
you the winner and you begin humbly acknowledging your great victory with a
series of polite, gracious nods and some invisible shrugs of self-effacement, many of
the geniuses start trying to rationally figure out the nature of your genius. A lot of different hypotheses
arise. Most of the geniuses are absolutely shell-shocked. ‘Perhaps’, one of
these bewildered individuals thinks, ‘This man is just the smartest person to
have ever lived. Somehow he has managed to live in obscurity until now but it
seems inevitable that this man will soon achieve a great triumph with the truly
incredible intellect he has demonstrated today.’ Some are so overwhelmed by
your display that they are doubting their senses and undergoing serious mental
breakdowns.
However, most do conclude that
there is something suspicious about the way you always looked down before
answering any question and always paused for at least twenty seconds before embarking
on any response. Some of this majority speculate that you must have breached
the one rule of the questionnaire: ‘He must have been holding some kind of
massive, vastly detailed encyclopaedia in his hands,’ these people think, even
though the rapidity with which you answered many of the questions and the sheer
diversity of the responses seem to contradict this. Einstein has concluded that
the most likely explanation is that you were assisted by some kind of brilliant
futuristic technology. Einstein has, of course, got it right.
But regardless of any of their
hypotheses, one fact still stands: you have proven yourself more knowledgeable
than the one-hundred geniuses. You have won.
And now suppose that the way you
interacted with the internet database was so instinctual and so immediate that
you didn’t need to look down at all or even pause before you answered any of
the questions. You would have got 100 out of 100 correct and blown the geniuses
out of the water.
This is what many futurists think
could be the reality in a few decades from now.
[1] A
bespectacled, gangly, scoliotic newt-fancier and English gent called Augustus
Fink-Nottle who is unknown in the 21st Century but did have an
eidetic memory so was naturally part of the one hundred sharpest minds of 1925.
[2]
Ok, so I did try to pull off Joyce’s idiolect after all – but not really. Don’t
hate.
No comments:
Post a Comment