Future Minds

How the Digital Age Is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters and What We Can Do About It
Author: Richard Watson
Genre: nonfiction
Publication info: Nicholas Brealey, 2010
Pages: 213

I wish everybody would read this book, and I mean everybody. If I had the money to do it, I would buy a copy for everyone I know. Anyone who knows me is welcome to borrow this from me. This is a topic that I care deeply about, especially lately, and I wish everyone would give it some thought.

The subject of the book is clear enough from the subtitle: the omnipresence of digital devices and social media in today's society is fundamentally changing the way we think and interact with other people. I've talked about this before in my review of The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (which Watson references multiple times in this book). Basically, we are so constantly filling up our time with instant information and digital diversions that we leave no time for deep, reflective thinking.

And it is deep, reflective, original, creative thinking that sets us apart as humans. Here is the scary thing that Watson points out. We know that computers are getting smarter. Google and Facebook know who you are. They can identify you in photographs and can figure out where the pictures were taken. But they became that smart only because humans made them that way. As capable as computers are, they are only good at solving predefined problems and processing data that is given to them. But they have no ability for dreaming up new ideas or asking original questions. As Watson puts it, "In the future a computer might be able to recognize a picture and tell you that it was painted in 1643 by Jan Josephsz. van Goyen [actually, it probably already can], but even then, you are unlikely to get an emotional response and even less likely to find that the computer becomes inspired and rushes off to paint something itself." It's the humans' place to do that.

But we are forfeiting our own thinking. We are increasingly relying on computers to do all our thinking and remembering for us, and we are always frantically searching for the next new bit of information. We're pulling out our phones in the middle of conversations, at the dinner table, in every quiet moment that we have. With all this, there is no time for original thinking, and without original thinking, there is nothing to set us apart from machines. Our obsession with the digital world is destroying what makes us who we are.

The point is that we need to scale back our fanaticism with everything digital. That isn't to say, as Watson states, that everything electronic is intrinsically evil, but we shouldn't be so eager to let it replace analogue forms of media and real, physical interaction with people. There needs to be a balance. There is an important role for physical books. Say what you will about how much more convenient ebooks are, you simply will not do the same calm, reflective thinking with those as you will with print media. Your mind is just not in the same state. Call me crazy, but physical books are irreplaceable. Just because something is more convenient doesn't always mean that it's better.

The great thing about this book is that it gives us ideas for what we can do about this crisis. The most important, I think, is that we just give ourselves time and space to think. That means putting away the phone, turning off the computer, and just thinking. When was the last time you just looked out the window in the car (when you're not driving, of course)? When was the last time you went for a walk and did nothing but look at the world around you? When was the last time you just sat and daydreamed? We need more of this as humans, but the trend is that these activities are diminishing.

Watson expresses all this much better than I do (although he does seem to ramble a bit sometimes, and possibly contradict himself), so I will end with another quote from him: "Given the fact that we seem to be capable of inventing more or less anything these days, perhaps a question we should be asking ourselves more frequently in the future is not whether we can invent something but whether we should."

Please, please read this book. And even more important, after you've read it, think about it.