Google in your Brain

I am currently reading Feed by M.T. Anderson. The book is about a futuristic world where people have tiny computers called Feeds in their brains. In this world the corporations control everything, including the schools. Students no longer learn about English or History. Instead they have classes about how to use your Feed and cool ways to decorate your room. The main character, a teen named Titus, thinks this is great and the old subjects are unnecessary because everyone is super smart thanks to the Feed. Anything someone wants to know can be looked up in his or her head. There is no need for personal thought or opinion. The Feed does it for you.

My first reaction to this was that the people in this book aren’t smart because these people don’t know things. The Feed knows things, and people who want to sell stuff control the feed. But then I started thinking, well even if someone did know all of the information the Feed could provide, would that really make them intelligent? I started thinking about this in terms of the search engines that we have today, such as Google. If someone searches something on Google, they will get a lot of information about it. They will get different opinions and thoughts and ideas about the topic with special interest groups lobbying for certain opinions. If someone were to have Google in their head with all the information on medieval times available to them on command, someone might think they were smart, until they asked the person what their opinion was on the condition that serfs lived in. They could look it up, but reciting the opinion of another person doesn’t make you personally more intelligent.

There is a certain aspect of being a smart person that is knowing facts, but if you can’t do anything with those facts then what is the point of knowing them. When we wrote our picture book forwards we had to do research, but we also included our own opinions about the subject, which is what got whatever our point was across. If we had simply written a list of random facts on the topic no one would have know what we were talking about.

Being able to memorize a bunch of facts doesn’t really make you smart.  The ability to interpret, decipher and form opinions about information makes you smart. If someone has information without understanding it or thinking about what it means, then they don’t really know about it. They know a few pieces of it but they don’t fully understand it. This is not intelligence. If a world anything like the one in Feed is the one we are headed to, then that is not a future I want to live in