I am a teacher by profession and I seldom find any student who can think"out of the box" or who can think really"absurd". This is mainly happening over last two decades of e-mania (WhatsApp, FB etc). Most of the questions they are asking can be found in Google. Aren't our next generation going towards intellectual stagnancy!! Next when will we find ground breaking innovations like "Theory of gravity" or " Theory of relativity" . If innovations stop then how long human race will survive? I may be absolutely wrong but I couldn't resist myself from asking this question in this wise community.
A simple Google search gives this link:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/17/nicholas-carr-are-we-becoming-too-reliant-on-computers
There are hardly persons who can think by themselves, that's not Google, that's the educational system that teaches submission and not knowledge. One sees it only when one looks at it, that is, once some prevaricator points it out for a purpose.
Like every technique, Internet and the search engines need time to adapt to. Most of their possibilities are ignored, because we want to reproduce the old schemes and procedures, that may or may not still be relevant. The same happend with the logarithm tables, then with the pocket calculators.
The answers are on search engines except that they are not necessarily on search engines. From the beginning of theory, which was when mass was declared to be a fundamental indefinable property, to today's extreme mathematical visits to other dimensions, the answers are too artificially easy. Those search engine reported answers aren't required to be proven or even to make sense. Yet students are taught that sometimes nonsense makes sense and that proofs are sometimes nonexistence except in the mind of the believer.
James A Putnam
Square roots are easily handled with continued fractions. Truncating the sequence we get an ordinary fraction, but I don't remember how to make a division on paper...
Some new technology are the same, but in another package.
Fb and such are different, especially the flow of comments and that there is no need to refine and erase, just move on, is not the same as in real world or in other computer contexts.
Concerning desk top and interfaces, I agree that it was better in the past with unix for work stations. We were lucky to have that some years, and it provided many options with a multitude of programs and interactive tasks in windows open at the same time on 4 screens to alter between. Now, one could choose also, but I don't understand e.g. why it is called cloud, bcz there must be hardware to collect the data.
Intellectual stagnancy perhaps at the individual level, but not for collective intelligence. For any little progress, formerly it took a genius and a life long work. But today it is possible to access a great quantity of ready-made thoughts, even ones that are tailored to the precise need. We rely too much on individualist procedures. Even in school and at the university, team work is not encouraged, and even often forbidden, while it is the rule at work. The big picture is that the connected society is deeply changing. Many dominant people already declined, and for the bad or for the good, including the professors.
I think complaints about the dangerous and destructive influence of technology on our ability to think have been fairly constant over time.
I remember a favourite joke about engineers of the past: "2 x 2? Let me check ... according to my advanced slide rule it is about 3.98". Then the complaint about students and engineers losing the ability to estimate orders-of-magnitude, when slide rules where replaced by pocket calculators. And so on...
Todays technology certainly does not prevent people from thinking out of the box, although too much reliance on established knowledge can be a major obstacle. On the other hand, the current much easier access to reliable facts may save much time pursuing wrong ideas. After all and sadly, most out-of-the box ideas turns out to be plain wrong (but that is not an arguments against continue trying).
In my opinion, there is one worrisome aspect of current technology, though. I have heard that young children who are too early and too much exposed to (say) iPad's actually get their brains wired in a different way. That sounds like a rather disruptive influence on human development.