Analysis Of Smarter Than You Think

In his essay Smarter than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, Clive Thompson explores the topic of technology and how it affects how we think and how we interact with each other. Throughout the essay, he uses many examples and comparisons that support his main point, which is that technology is in fact making us smarter by extending our memory and augmenting our abilities. The topic of whether technology is improving our lives is a highly debated one, and Thompson in his essay gives us his point of view on the matter. Although I reaffirm the claim that technology has improved our lives, there are small details from Thompson’s essay that I would like to address in the following paragraphs. Right away Thompson asks a question, the question of whether humans or computers are better at chess. He goes on to describe how in the late nineties a computer finally beat the chess world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a complete game of chess. But instead of giving up completely after being terribly beaten by a …show more content…
I agree that technology has improved out lives in a positive way. However, to say that technology in and of itself is making us “smarter” is a misconception. The question I ask is this: Has technology improved our brain’s function, its abilities, or its capacity in any way? I would argue that it has not. Technology has enhanced our productivity and given us the ability to store information externally, but humans apart from machines have not gotten smarter. Yes, we do use computers as tools and aids in educating ourselves, but just using a computer does not make you smarter. It is the learning and intellect that you gain by using a computer that makes you “smarter.” It is productivity, speed, and efficiency that we gain with the use of a computer. These gains, although they do not necessarily make us smarter, do bring us closer to “human