Smarter Than You Think Summary

Do you ever think about the rapid growth of technology and how it changes our day to day lives? Does it make you a little anxious? Well, don’t freak out just yet, implies Clive Thompson, a Canadian freelance journalist, a blogger, science, and technology writer. He is the author of the book Smarter than you Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better: he explains that this anxious feeling is normal and has been evident whenever we discover new technology. Thompson says it’s okay to feel this way; his justification is that new technology helps us in positive ways more than we think it impairs us.

In the beginning paragraph, Thompson asks a question “Who’s better at chess---computer or humans?” In order to beat any human or …show more content…
They don't have intuition or that gut feeling that allows us to make decisions. Machines aren’t creative; they lack the ability to feel emotion or what other humans feel. On the other hand, Chess-playing computers crunch all the possible moves or plays, calculating all the right plays; for humans that would be impossible because we can’t maintain that much information in our brain. We don't have the capacity for that much information overload. As Thompson said, “The machine’s way of thinking is fundamentally unhuman”. However, he does applaud what humans can do over computers. In fact, Thompson’s idea was not just to play a human vs. computers in chess but asks what if they team up. They could have a computer and human versus another computer and human, which enables each element to bring something to the table and working together will mean more success. But with computers, come a lot of consequences; you have to be aware of all the impact of computerization.Thompson sees that we have too much information with our phones, cameras, and hard drives. But these tools do make it much easier for us to connect and communicate. If we increase our ability to create more