Thinking with Technology

This is the seventh post in the series The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (Unabridged), written by Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach. Thinking with Technology is a chapter in this book. Much has already been written in this blog on this topic, so this post will try to hit some unique points.

In the healthy memory blog Thinking with Technology comes under the category transactive memory as information in technology, be it paper or the internet, falls into this category. Actually Thinking with Other People also falls into this category as transactive memory refers to all information not stored in our own biological brains. Sloan and Fernbach realize this similarity as they write that we are starting to treat our technology more and more like people, like full participants in the community of knowledge. Just as we store understanding in other people, we store understanding in the internet. We already know that our having knowledge available in other people’s heads leads us to overrate our own understanding. We live in a community that shares knowledge, so each of us individually can fail to distinguish whether knowledge is stored in our own head or in someone else’s. This is the illusion of explanatory depth, viz., I think I understand things better than I do because I incorporate other people’s understanding into my assessment of my own understanding.

Two different research groups have found that we have the same kind of “confusion at the frontier” when we search the internet. Adrian Ward of the University of Texas found that engaging in Internet searches increased people’s cognitive self-esteem, their own sense of they ability to remember and process information. Moreover, people who searched the internet for facts they didn’t know and were later asked where they found the information often misremembered and reported that they had known it all along. Many completely forgot ever having conducted the search, giving themselves credit instead of Google.

Matt Fisher and Frank Keil conducted a study in which participants were asked to answer a series of general causal knowledge questions like, “How does a zipper work?” One group was asked to search the internet to confirm the details of their explanation. Th other group was asked to answer the questions without using any outside sources. Next, participants were asked to rate how well they could answer questions in domains that had nothing to do with the questions they were asked in the first phase. The finding was that those who had searched the internet rated their ability to answer unrelated questions as higher than those who had not.

The risk here should not be underestimated. Interactions with the internet can result in our thinking we know more than we know. It is important to make a distinction between what is accessible in memory and what is available in memory. If you can provide answers without consulting any external sources, then the information is accessible and is truly in your personal biological memory. However, if you need to consult the internet, or some other technical source,or some individual, then although the information is available, but not accessible. This is the difference between a closed book test or an open book test. Unless you can perform extemporaneously and accurately, be sure to consult transactive memory

Sloman and Fernbach have some unique perspectives. They discount the risk of super intelligence threatening humans, at least for now. They seem to think that there is no current basis for some real super intelligence taking over the world. The reason they offer for this is that technology does not (yet) share intentionality with us. HM does not quite understand why they argue this, and, in any case, the ‘yet” is enclosed in parentheses, implying that this is just a matter of time.

To summarize succinctly, technology increases our knowing more than we know. In other words, it increases the knowledge illusion.

© Douglas Griffith and healthymemory.wordpress.com, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Douglas Griffith and healthymemory.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tags: Adrian Ward, Frank Keil, Matt Fisher, Phillip Fernbach, Steven Sloman, super intelligence, The Knowledge Illusion