Thank you, Carl Zimmer, for reminding me my brain is in my head, not in Nick Carr’s allusions.

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Yeah, that Kubrick guy gets me every time, too. Until, that is, I remember I’M the moron who turned on the DVD player and watched the movie! HAL is a fictional character, right?

But, even more so, the glia connecting our neurons, pulsating and switching off for a rest, according to Zimmer, create technologies unfathomed at the breath-taking pace, like jokes I forget. I’m not dismayed Nietzache needed a typewriter to write some of my favorite books. I’m depressed he was limited by a typewriter. Why didn’t he get beyond the tape and keys? The technology arrives too quickly, I agree, and it’s easy to demonize it. But, there’s an useful surplus of potential. Invention is the mother of necessity, and then comes the fun part.

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Filed under: Podcasts, Science Tagged: carl zimmer, chris mooney, jared diamonf, nicolas carr, point of inquiry