Nicholas Carr's Blog

The internet is getting old. Nearly four decades have passed since an unassuming British programmer named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in his office at the CERN particle-accelerator complex near Geneva. By transforming the net, until then an arcane research hub for scientists and engineers, into a buzzing, hyperlinked, multimedia information system, Berners-Lee unwittingly sparked the public’s mass migration online. He also, as he writes ...

The twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders were married for eight years, from 1929 until 1937, and I would like to suggest that by marrying Arendt’s idea of homo faber with Anders’s idea of Promethean shame we can uncover a hidden aspect of generative artificial intelligence that is fated to cast a tragic shadow over us and our work from here on out. In creating what might best be called machina faber, we have brought into the wo...

Today’s Sunday Rerun is a piece I posted in late 2014, at the tail end of the great MOOC hype. (“MOOC” was an acronym for massive open online course, in case you’ve forgotten.) As tech companies push AI tools into schools, and teachers and students adopt them in a rush to make education more efficient, it’s worth asking what exactly we’re trying to accomplish by automating the work of learning—a topic I discussed earlier in “The Myth of Automated Learning.”

“After the first minute of content you will have what we call minutes 1 thru 3.”
—MrBeast, “How to Succeed in MrBeast Production”

A couple of years ago, I watched a MrBeast YouTube video on my phone. References to MrBeast were everywhere at the time—he had recently become the most popular YouTuber ever—and I felt that, to be culturally current, I should acquaint myself with his oeuvre.

My memory of the video is fuzzy, but the premise went something like this: Two strangers...

Today’s Sunday Rerun is the epilogue to The Big Switch, my 2008 book on cloud computing and its consequences (and electrification and its consequences). This closing bit looks at the way humanity’s sense of progress hinges on generational turnover—on death, to be blunt. It’s a subject that’s almost never discussed, but I hope to explore it further this year.

One of man’s greatest inventions was also one of his most modest: the wick. We don’t know who fir...

In a paper published in 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom sketched out a thought experiment aimed at illustrating an existential risk that artificial intelligence might eventually pose to humanity. An advanced AI is given, by its human programmers, the objective of optimizing the production of paperclips. The machine sets off in monomaniacal pursuit of the objective, its actions untempered by common sense or ethical c...

Big social media companies are facing hundreds of personal-injury lawsuits claiming that their platforms have harmed people, particularly kids. Lawyers for the plaintiffs, which include individuals, states, and school districts, are modeling the suits on the successful litigation against cigarette companies at the end of the last century. Should the social media companies lose the suits, the first of which began this week in Los Angeles...

If the stakes weren’t so high, the barrage of text messages between world leaders in the days running up to the World Economic Forum in Davos would be amusing. Texting turns everyone into a semiliterate twelve-year-old, and presidents, prime ministers, and secretaries general are no exception. We’re used to the President of the United States communicating with the American public in weirdly punctuated streams of all-caps, exclamation marks, and typos, but to ...

Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post I originally published in May 2018. It looks at the way popular metaphors shape how we see our relationship with tech companies and their products—and our sense of personal responsibility and agency in using technologies. I’m hoping to write more on this subject in the months ahead, so I’m republishing this as a starting point.

Mines and Factories

Am I a data mine, or am I a data factory? Is data extracted from me, or is...

If you’ve done much googling recently, you’ve probably noticed the odd and dubious set of sources that Google’s large language model draws from in generating the “AI Overviews” that now appear at the top of the company’s search results (after the ads, of course). Rather than dig deep into authoritative writings on a subject, Google’s bot usually pieces together its overview from recently published, cursory summaries posted on a hodgepodge of highly trafficked websites — the same dumbed-down, sea...