Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

Still, for video to really advance as a medium for thinking, there’s one major shift that will have to occur: We’ll need to begin using it to communicate with ourselves.

Traditionally,“literacy” has primarily meant two things: being able to read and being able to write. That’s still true, and it will remain true for a long time, because the written word remains an exquisitely flexible tool for formalizing and manipulating knowledge. And as I wrote in the last chapter, digital tools have created a renaissance in the written word.
But as the Fordham students realized, digital tools are giving us new and powerful ways of grappling with information. Technically, the students could have used pen and paper to work out the districting problem.

what you’re not thinking about—what you’re ignoring.

We’ll truly figure out what Watson is for only when people begin using the software to make jokes, to play games, to hassle each other

letting the human continue to do what the human does uniquely

views, they regard them as inherently more intelligent than optimistic ones; when we’re trying to seem smart to others, we tend to say critical, negative things.

Tools for thinkinghelp make people smarter. But they don’t necessarily make them morally better

One of the dangersof online conversation is if it remainsconversation, never turning into action. Complaining is easy—much easier than getting out of your chair

To make social change begin to snowball, we need to make our thoughts visible

artificial forgetting—designing sharing tools so they automatically delete photos or posts after a period of time. As he argues, this would let us enjoy the benefits of ambient intimacy without accumulating archives of our behavior