Hybrid Intelligence

The smartest thing anyone has said about our relationship with technology is this: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” That deceptively simple dictum is number one in a list of laws composed in the mid 1980s by history professor Melvin Kranzberg. I believe in Kranzberg’s law because so often we swing between extremes when thinking about the internet and its cronies: there will always be the Nicholas Carrs of the world, reminding us in books like The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains that our very patterns of thought are being tampered with each time we bathe our brains in an online experience; and there will always be fervent optimists, too, hallooing from their Silicon Valley offices about the glories of the coming singularity, after which point obliging machinery will bond with our brains and deliver us from the drudgery of our biological selves. Kranzberg’s law states that things are always more complicated, that there is...