Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
internalize the game much more profoundly and advance to new levels of human excellence.
Before computers came along, back when Kasparov was a young boy in the 1970s in the Soviet Union, learning grand-master-level chess was a slow, arduous affair. If you showed promise and you were very lucky, you could find a local grand master to teach you. If you were one of the tiny handful who showed world-class promise, Soviet leaders would fly you to Moscow and give you access to their elite chess library, which contained laboriously transcribed paper records of the world’s top games. Retrieving records was a painstaking affair; you’d contemplate a possible opening, use the catalog to locate games that began with that move, and then the librarians would retrieve records from thin files, pulling them out using long sticks resembling knitting needles. Books of chess games were rare and incomplete. By gaining access to the Soviet elite library, Kasparov and his peers developed an enormous advantage over their global rivals. That library was their cognitive augmentation.
But beginning in the 1980s, computers took over the library’s role and bested it. Young chess enthusiasts could buy CD-ROMs filled with hundreds of thousands of chess games. Chess-playing software could show you how an artificial opponent would respond to any move. This dramatically increased the pace at which young chess players built up intuition. If you were sitting at lunch and had an idea for a bold new opening move, you could instantly find out which historic players had tried it, then war-game it yourself by playing against software. The iterative process of thought experiments—“If I did this, then what would happen?”—sped up exponentially.
Chess itself began to evolve. “Players became more creative and daring,” as Frederic Friedel, the publisher of the first popular chess databases and software, tells me. Before computers, grand masters would stick to lines of attack they’d long studied and honed. Since it took weeks or months for them to research and mentally explore the ramifications of a new move, they stuck with what they knew. But as the next generation of players emerged, Friedel was astonished by their unusual gambits, particularly in their opening moves. Chess players today, Kasparov has written, “are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t.”
Most remarkably, it is producing players who reach grand master status younger. Before computers, it was extremely rare for teenagers to become grand masters. In 1958, Bobby Fischer stunned the world by achieving that status at fifteen. The feat was so unusual it was over three decades before the record was broken, in 1991. But by then computers had emerged, and in the years since, the record has been broken twenty times, as more and more young players became grand masters. In 2002, the Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin became one at the tender age of twelve.38
So yes, when we’re augmenting ourselves, we can be smarter. We’re becoming centaurs. But our digital tools can also leave us smarter even when we’re not actively using them.
Let’s turn to a profound area where our thinking is being augmented: the world of infinite memory.
What prompts a baby, sitting on the kitchen floor at eleven months old, to suddenly blurt out the word “milk” for the first time? Had the parents said the word more frequently than normal? How many times had the baby heard the word pronounced—three thousand times? Or four thousand times or ten thousand? Precisely how long does it take before a word sinks in anyway? Over the years, linguists have tried to ask parents to keep diaries of what they say to their kids, but it’s ridiculously hard to monitor household conversation. The parents will skip a day or forget the details or simply get tired of the process. We aren’t good at recording our lives in precise detail, because, of course, we’re busy living them.
In 2005, MIT speech scientist Deb Roy and his wife, Rupal Patel (also a speech scientist) were expecting their first child—a golden opportunity, they realized, to observe the boy developing language. But they wanted to do it scientifically. They wanted to collect an actual record of every single thing they, or anyone, said to the child—and they knew it would work only if the recording was done automatically. So Roy and his MIT students designed “TotalRecall,” an audacious setup that involved wiring his house with cameras and microphones. “We wanted to create,” he tells me, “the ultimate memory machine.”
In the months before his son arrived, Roy’s team installed wide-angle video cameras and ultrasensitive microphones in every room in his house. The array of sensors would catch every interaction “down to the whisper” and save it on a huge rack of hard drives stored in the basement. When Roy and his wife brought their newborn home from the hospital, they turned the system on. It began producing a firehose of audio and video: About 300 gigabytes per day, or enough to fill a normal laptop every twenty-four hours. They kept it up for two years, assembling a team of grad students and scientists to analyze the flow, transcribe the chatter, and figure out how, precisely, their son learned to speak.
They made remarkable discoveries. For example, they found that the boy had a burst of vocabulary acquisition—“word births”—that began around his first birthday and then slowed drastically seven months later. When one of Roy’s grad students analyzed this slowdown,1 an interesting picture emerged: At the precise moment that those word births were decreasing, the boy suddenly began using far more two-word sentences. “It’s as if he shifted his cognitive effort2 from learning new words to generating novel sentences,” as Roy later wrote about it. Another grad student discovered that the boy’s caregivers3 tended to use certain words in specific locations in the house—the word “don’t,” for example, was used frequently in the hallway, possibly because caregivers often said “don’t play on the stairs.” And location turned out to be important: The boy tended to learn words more quickly when they were linked to a particular space. It’s a tantalizing finding, Roy points out,4 because it suggests we could help children learn language more effectively by changing where we use words around them. The data is still being analyzed, but his remarkable experiment has the potential to transform how early-language acquisition is understood.
It has also, in an unexpected way, transformed Roy’s personal life. It turns out that by creating an insanely nuanced scientific record of his son’s first two years, Roy has created the most detailed memoir in history.
For example, he’s got a record of the first day his son walked. On-screen, you can see Roy step out of the bathroom and notice the boy standing, with a pre-toddler’s wobbly balance, about six feet away. Roy holds out his arms and encourages him to walk over: “Come on, come on, you can do it,” he urges. His son lurches forward one step, then another, and another—his first time successfully doing this. On the audio, you can actually hear the boy squeak to himself in surprise: Wow! Roy hollers to his mother, who’s visiting and is in the kitchen: “He’s walking! He’s walking!”
It’s rare to catch this moment on video for any parent. But there’s something even more unusual about catching it unintentionally. Unlike most first-step videos caught by a camera-phone-equipped parent, Roy wasn’t actively trying to freeze this moment; he didn’t get caught up in the strange, quintessentially modern dilemma that comes from trying to simultaneously experience something delightful while also acting and getting it on tape. (When we brought my son a candle-bedecked cupcake on his first birthday, I spent so much time futzing with snapshots—it turns out cheap cameras don’t focus well when the lights are turned off—that I later realized I hadn’t actually watched the moment with my own eyes.) You can see Roy genuinely lost in the moment, enthralled. Indeed, he only realized weeks after his son walked that he could hunt down the digital copy; when he pulled it out, he was surprised to find he’d completely misremembered the event. “I originally remembered it being a sunny morning, my wife in the kitchen,” he says. “And when we finally got the video it was not a sunny morning, it was evening; and it was not my wife in the kitchen, it was my mother.”
Roy can perform even crazier feats of recall. His system