Yet more Andy Clark

At the risk of boring regular readers to tears, but catching some poor unexpecting soul who's gotten here via Google, I'll point to this Financial Times piece on rethinking cyborgs. Not surprisingly, a significant portion of the piece deals with Andy Clark's work. (We interviewed Clark for our Ten Year Forecast last year; you can read the transcript here.)

Cyborgs are all around us. They’re larking around in the schoolyard, working in hospitals, running the country, indistinguishable from you and me. In fact, say some leading figures in the world of cognitive science, we are all cyborgs now - although perhaps not in the way you might think....

I started thinking about these issues a few weeks ago while at the pub, as often seems to be the case. It was a friend’s birthday party and I was trying to convince a very nice historian about how the internet and Google and so on might be thought of as a kind of extension to our minds. “You’re looking at it so unhistorically,” she said. “The internet’s no different really to a library. It’s a place where information is stored and retrieved.”...

I put to [Clark] my historian adversary’s point - that the internet is nothing more than a fancy library. “Not at all,” he replied to my e-mail. “Portable access and great search engines transform a mere library into a cognitive prosthetic.

”We have always been cyborgs, at least since language got a grip on the species,” he continued. “But new interfaces and robust, portable, soon-to-be implantable, technology makes it all the more dramatic.”

Clark argues that there is little significant conceptual difference between a highly accessible computer outside our body, and one implanted into our body.

I reviewed the book when it first came out, and find myself going to back to its core ideas constantly. When I first picked it up, my initial thought was, "Oh great, another over-reaching book by a computer scientist;" that opinion lasted about ten minutes. I now suspect it's going to be remembered as one of the more important books of the decade.

Comments

[Franz]

Alex,

Thanks for the followup, your first post inspired me to read Andy Clark's book, and I enjoyed it very much ... always an interesting topic.