Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I found it funny, although also quite sad, that throughout this essay the author said again and again how it is becoming increasingly harder for individuals to read through longer essays, when his essay itself is seven pages long. It makes me wonder if those who read "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" ever finished the essay or if they simply skimmed the surface because they were unable to focus on seven long pages. As the author, Nicholas Carr put it so well, "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." That quote scares me in a way because I never want it to be true of myself. Speaking literally, I love the water and am fascinated by what is below the ocean's surface and I just wouldn't be myself if all I did was stay afloat. What makes it scary is that I seem to be floating up to the surface and it seems as if it is getting harder to sink again.
Another part of this essay that I found to be disturbing was the fact that this mental change due to the use of search engines like Google is, just like everything else, driven by money. The internet is spying on you. It tracks what sites you frequent and then puts adds for those sites on various other sites you visit. These ads are flashy and distracting and draw your attention away from whatever your reason for visiting the site was. How does this make anyone money? Well, sites pay other sites to post their ads and then people buy things because of those ads. The people in charge of the sites really don't care that they are ruining peoples' concentration as long as they themselves are making money. That is just one more part of our world that is being controlled by money.
This essay brought up the difference between real and artificial intelligence. Real intelligence is the intelligence that a person gains from attending school and artificial intelligence is the knowledge people accumulate for a short period of time from the internet. Just like the quote about scuba diving vs. jet skiing, this is a scary concept. The fact that people are starting to have more artificial intelligence makes me wonder what people will do in the future when large scale problems arise. When your faucet is leaking, yes, it is great to be able to quickly watch a YouTube video on how to fix it, but what if a never before known of epidemic breaks out? Or what if global warming becomes a scary reality and humans are forced to move into outer space on a ship like something from Wall-e? Then what? Google does not have the answer for such questions and that is why real intelligence is so important. We need to know what to do in these types of situations and so in this case, I would have to say that yes, Google is making us stupid, or at least less prepared.
Does all of this mean that Google is bad though? No. Google, and all other search engines, are very helpful! While writing this very piece I used Google to listen to music, and to find out whether to underline or italicize movie titles in essays. Am I more stupid because of it, no. However if Google is something you rely on like a baby does it's mother while it is still very young, yes, Google very well may be making you more stupid.