Artificial Intelligentsia

Artificial Intelligentsia: (Subscription required to read this article in the October edition of The Atlantic online.)

I think Jim Fallows is a national resource, and his contributions to the Atlantic are great both on information technology and on current events. The current piece is a thoughtful discussion of the value of computers to people -- suggesting quite reasonably that they are better regarded as intelligence amplifiers than as artificial people. Thus they amplify our mental abilities the way motor vehicles amplify our ability to run, factory machinery amplifies our ability to fabricate things, or optical devices amplify our ability to see.

But I wanted to share this paragraph, which seems to offer some generally useful tips on what to use right now to amplify you mental abilities.

"A search engine called Clusty, founded by Carnegie Mellon computer scientists and based in Pittsburgh, returns its search results grouped by topic category. Type in “theory of evolution,” for instance, and it will tell you which sites discuss Charles Darwin, which cover modern developments in the theory, and which discuss its relationship with the Bible. An experimental search engine developed at the University of Maryland, at tinyurl.com/qkpht, also provides useful categorized results. Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, has a very useful “Zoom” feature. Type in “theory of evolution” there, and it will suggest that you might want to narrow the search for information about the mechanics of natural selection, or broaden it to a general query about the beginnings of life. Cnet’s news site has a feature called “Big Picture.” After you enter a query, it produces a concept map showing the related topics to explore. Grokker was a pioneer in producing such concept maps, and remains a useful and reliably interesting way to display the overlaps and divergences among items discovered by a Web search. Raymond Kurzweil’s site employs an idea map of its own. When I’m doing a search to develop a theme and not to check spot knowledge, I have found that these categorizing sites—especially Ask.com—save me time in getting where I want to go."