Nicholas Carr's Blog

Seventeen years ago, when MySpace was bigger than Facebook and going online still felt liberating, The Atlantic published my essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in its summer Ideas issue. With AI now being sold to the public as an intelligence amplifier, just as the net was then, I offer the essay as today’s Sunday Rerun. It’s always good to be reminded that the ultimate effects of a broadly adopted new technology never match the early ...

One day in 1953, a young and at the time little-known experimental artist named Robert Rauschenberg arrived at the studio of the great abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning bearing a bottle of Jack Daniels and a strange request. He wanted the famous artist to give him one of his drawings so he could erase it. De Kooning was taken aback. “I remember that the idea of destruction kept coming into the conversation,” Rauschenberg later r...

Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post that originally appeared on my old blog, Rough Type, at the end of 2021. Written about a year after OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 and a year before its unveiling of ChatGPT, it’s one of my first attempts to make sense of generative AI. (I would also work some of this material into the AI chapter of my book Superbloom .) The connection between AI and the Spiritualism movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is something I hope to write more about soon.

I was going to end my last post, “Against Compression,” with a coda about a fictional artist, but I decided the piece already placed enough demands on the reader’s patience. So here it is, a free-floating coda. Affix it to whatever you’d like.

The career of the contemporary French artist Jed Martin is a twisty one, full of incursions and recursions. (Michel Houellebecq chronicles them all in his 2010 novel The Map and the Territory.) As a boy, Jed would sit i...

My Brief Career in Abstraction

I was a generative pre-trained transformer before GPTs were cool. After dropping out of grad school in the mid-eighties, I landed a job with a new digital-media division of H. W. Wilson, the venerable publisher whose Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature had long been a mainstay of library reference desks. Looking to capitalize on the surging popularity of personal computers and online databases, the company had decided to create a digital supplement to the Guide ...

One recent Tuesday, at two thirty-seven in the afternoon, I received an email from UPS letting me know that a package had been delivered to my home. Attached, as evidence, was a blurry, off-kilter photograph of a small, slightly dented but otherwise nondescript cardboard box that had been placed on my driveway, next to the garage door. A minute later, at thirty-eight minutes past two, I received a second email announcing the p...

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion, a celibate by choice, sculpts a beautiful woman in ivory and falls in love with her. “He kisses it and feels his kisses are returned.” Nearly two thousand years later, in 1913, George Bernard Shaw uses Ovid’s story as the basis for his play Pygmalion, in which the phonetics professor Henry Higgins teaches the cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle to speak the King’s English and in the process becomes...

Among the general public, generative AI’s most enthusiastic early adopters have been students. Surveys conducted a year ago revealed that nearly 90 percent of college students and more than 50 percent of high-schoolers were regularly using chatbots for schoolwork. Those numbers are certainly higher now. AI may be the most rapidly adopted educational tool since the pencil.

Because text-generating bots like ChatGPT offer an easy way...

The new version of Mark Zuckerberg — I’ll call him alt-Mark — is peddling a new version of the metaverse. The original idea behind the virtual world, as you may hazily recall, was that we’d be digitally transformed into legless cartoon characters who would fly around a cartoon planet having sword fights and doing other supposedly fun things. It was a reboot of The Jetsons with Mr. Spacely as executive producer.

That version didn’t come close to achieving crit...

It was a little more than a decade ago that Google started its Bay Area bus service to shuttle employees back and forth to work. Other big tech firms, including Facebook and Apple, followed suit, creating a comfortable, clean, efficient, private mass-transit system for what Marc Andreessen would later call “the reality privileged.” Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post I wrote in early 2014 about the Google bus as vehicle and symbol.

Mobile. Socia...