Bill Nye, making nerds look good.
We’ve had a number of running debates about the future of technology, especially as it relates to learning in the 21st Century. Will having an iPhone in our pocket loaded with Google’s search technology really replace our need to practice “lower order” thinking skills?
Gizmodo interviewed Bill Nye (the Science Guy) and asked him pretty much the same question. Excerpts from the interview:
Are smartphones and Google going to take the place of our memory?
I don’t think so. If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you’re a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else, doesn’t it? Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.
So you’re saying that even before the iPhone and Google and everything, we were offloading information?
That’s what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies. If you put a blaze on a trail, a stripe of paint or ax chop on a tree, it shows other humans where the trail is. It’s storing information outside of your bodies. It’s the hallmark of being a human. I mean, dogs and other animals mark trees—and I’m all for that—but it isn’t quite the same.
So we’re not going to get stupider as a result of using computers?
Boy, I don’t think so.
…
In geographical terms, GPS has done that too, right? People don’t have to remember anymore.
The US Navy has several people on every ship that can navigate by the stars. They don’t fool with that. Have you ever heard of the electro-magnetic pulse? The US Navy is very sensitive to this failure mode where people explode enough weapons high in the atmosphere and a significant fraction of the satellites are disabled. What are you going to do? You’re a ship at sea in a trackless ocean. Cadets from the Naval Academy know how to navigate by the stars.
[via Gizmodo, interview by Wilson Rothman]
