Doing the right things rather than doing things right

Having just read Nicolas Carr's article asking whether Google (or the web) is making us Stupid I'm struck with its prescience, particularly with how it relates to the question of why we do anything. To paraphrase the famous line, doing things right is very different from doing the right thing, and so it is important to question a tool like the web. Perhaps finding such and such restaurant faster is a good thing, or booking a flight via my blackberry is cool, but what if the conversation at that restaurant is horrible? What if we leave feeling unhappy? What if we are taking a flight to the wrong place? With the wrong person?

Carr's point is that the web is changing how we think. Just like the man with the hammer who thinks everything is a nail, so to is the web making us view everything through "binary code" eyes and brains. Carr suggests that we should all take a big step back, perhaps also take a moment to quiet our minds and our lives, and recall that the world we make is supposed to be in service of our greater purposes, and not some kind of social treadmill that gives us something to do, but gets us nowhere.

So, while Google may make an artificial intelligence out of the web, that intelligence will still have to figure out why it exists. Just like we have to. And it seems, once we have that in place, that finding the right tools will flow naturally from there. And then a wicked-fast Google search won't be such a bad thing.